History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.
A handful of works in history have had a direct impact on social policy: one or two works of Dickens, some of Zola, 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' and, in modern drama, Larry Kramer's 'The Normal Heart.'
Who I am as an architect and the history of my work - that's clear to anybody who hires me. But I come in literally with nothing in my brain about what the building will look like.
History is not a long series of centuries in which men did all the interesting/important things and women stayed home and twiddled their thumbs in between pushing out babies, making soup and dying in childbirth.
Malaysia is a country unlike any other: Full of promise and fragility. Its history, cultural and religious diversity make it a rich, compelling and surprising land.
I don't have a long history of hit singles of my own. I had a few, and I had a little hot streak in the '70s, but I've had a lot of success producing other people.
I'm the first Thai prime minister in history that first time win half of parliament seats and second time win 76% of parliamentary seats and I was ousted because too popular.
Jesus was not born in a manger in central Pennsylvania. He was a man of color. And the fact that we have represented him for centuries literally as a white man speaks to the entire history of white supremacy.
Captain Cook discovered Australia looking for the Terra Incognita. Christopher Columbus thought he was finding India but discovered America. History is full of events that happened because of an imaginary tale.
I'm absolutely convinced that the very small global warming we are experiencing is the result of natural causes. It's a cyclical phenomenon in the history of the Earth. The role of man is very small, almost negligible.
I am not playing for any lobby. I am playing for national lobby. I will ignore lobby. Anybody has useful suggestion, they can give it to me. The history will speak about it.
To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say 'my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn't matter.'
My clerkship with Justice Douglas was tremendously important. He told me, Christopher, get out into the stream of history and see what happens. I've tried to follow that advice.
I quite like antiques. I like things that are old and the history they bring with them. I would rather fly to Morocco on an $800 ticket and buy a chair for $300 than spend $1,100 on one at Pottery Barn.
If we glance at the most important revolutions in history, we see at once that the greatest number of these originated in the periodical revolutions on the human mind.
Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease, and will find themselves on the wrong ...
That so unlikely an outcome should accrue to a man possessed of such limited talent and so many flaws, and one lacking in a sense of ethics and decency was one of the bitter ironies of history.
A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.
I think I now understand why it is that the young are so very nostalgic. They have so little by way of personal history that they polish it up and make it shine like a treasured heirloom.
Something new has happened: For the first time in German history our fatherland is guided by a plan that considers only the needs of the people, and aims at building prosperity and reconstructing of our fatherland.
It was August 28th, 1963, and the greatest civil rights coalition in modern history had descended upon Washington. Hundreds of thousands of protesters trekked through the heat, stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.
