Over the course of human history, many items have briefly flourished as means of exchange, only to be demonetarized. Now, we have demonetarized money.
By just living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the blankets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the phone history logs.
The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.
Ritual is important to us as human beings. It ties us to our traditions and our histories.
The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.
In the long run, even a tyrannical government only has the power that the people confer on it and coming to understand history is the beginning of making things right.
History is, in its essentials, the science of change. It knows and it teaches that it is impossible to find two events that are ever exactly alike, because the conditions from which they spring are never identical.
From their experience or from the recorded experience of others (history), men learn only what their passions and their metaphysical prejudices allow them to learn.
No matter how vital experience might be while you lived it, no sooner was it ended and dead than it became as lifeless as the piles of dry dust in a school history book.
When you go visiting countries, you start reading the history of the place and you start getting into the culture, and then you have to leave. In my experience, all countries have hidden treasures.
Fiction is a very powerful tool for teaching history. The Philippines was the first Iraq, the first Vietnam, the first Afghanistan, in the sense that it was the United States' initial or baptismal experience in nation-building.
So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
I love places that have an incredible history. I love the Italian way of life. I love the food. I love the people. I love the attitudes of Italians.
I can't think of a time in the history of man when food was in excess. We're dealing with the same old problems we've dealt with for 60,000 years.
Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.
As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.
New Orleans has a unique history as a great melting pot of all kinds of cultures, and that manifests itself now through the food, the music, and the kinds of people who live there.
The more laws that governments pass, the less individual freedom there is. Any student of history will tell you that. Totalitarian countries ban pretty much everything.
I think we're struggling with trying to redefine various positions at this point in history. To allow freedom for women, freedom for men, freedom from those sharply defined gender roles.
The message of Passover remains as powerful as ever. Freedom is won not on the battlefield but in the classroom and the home. Teach your children the history of freedom if you want them never to lose it.
I do believe in the power of freedom. The power of freedom is the mightiest force of history. Once that power unleashes, it ultimately leads to peace and prosperity.
