[A]s military history reveals, a bad plan is often better than no plan, especially if the people on the other side think it’s a good plan.
Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.
Free nations with different histories, economies and a vast amount of stubborn pride will never achieve complete agreement, even when they desire the same objectives.
When we can’t see ourselves in our history, we begin to think that we are disconnected and suffering alone. Historical ignorance always precedes cultural imbalances and individual despair.
My first reaction, every time I delve into an episode of history that I don’t know very much about, is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.
Occasionally a particular word or phrase in a letter or diary has sparked an entire plot - like an echo from history, still very alive.
Too many writers are trying to write with too shallow an education. Whether they go to college or not is immaterial...a good writer needs a sense of the history of literature to be successful as a writer.
Looking at the stars is a glimpse of history. Some of the things we see are millions of light-years away. Everything in the universe has a past but stars don't try to hide it. They just keep shinning, for everyone to see.
In 1487 alone, two hundred heretics had-in one of the greatest euphemisms in the history of language-"relaxed," that is, burned at the stake. Dogs of God, Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors
The fame of his likes circulates briskly but soon grows heavy and stale; and as for history it will limit his life story to the dash between two dates.
I bet in the All-Time History of Dating no girl has ever told a boy who has just asked her out that she has fleas-and then farted!
In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be...
[C]hange your thinking, your interpretation of he world, change the way you see! To change the way you see is to change the world. (50)
The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion […] but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.
He said that that what men do not understand is that what the dead have quit is itself no world but is only the picture of the world in men's hearts. He said that the world cannot be quit for it is eternal in whatever form as are all things within it...
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.
It's not much. You begin by thinking there is something extraordinary about it. But you'll find out, when you've been out in the world a while longer, unhappiness is the commonest thing there is.
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
The main point of the article was that a man's world is different from a women's world and a man's emotions are different from a women's emotions and only marriage can bring the two worlds and the two different sets of emotions together properly.
By the 1950s The Novel had become a nationwide tournament. There was a magical assumption that the end of World War II in 1945 was the dawn of a new golden age of the American Novel, like the Hemingway-Dos Passos-Fitzgerald era after World War I.
The truth be told, the World Trade Center was neither a very good work of architecture nor a very successful piece of urbanism. Its shortcomings were somewhat mitigated by the westward and southward expansion of the World Financial Center and Battery...
