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Exlpore more History quotes
"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."
"In the parlor was a huge camera on wheels like the ones used in public parks, and the backdrop of a marine twilight, painted with homemade paints, and the walls papered with pictures of children at memorable moments: the first Communion, the bunny costume, the happy birthday. Year after year, during contemplative pauses on afternoons of chess, Dr. Urbino had seen the gradual covering over of the walls, and he had often thought with a shudder of sorrow that in the gallery of casual portraits lay the germ of the future of the city, governed and corrupted by those unknown children, where note even the ashes of his glory would remain."
"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
"History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies."
"The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy."
"Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new."
"Every past is worth condemning."
"Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living. that's the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn't matter if it's a hundred years or only a few weeks. It's all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers."
"Upon examination of a people's history, beware the story teller's motives."
Explore more quotes by Naguib Mahfouz
"I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday."
"I believe society has a right to defend itself, just as the individual has the right to attack that with which he disagrees."
"The Nobel Prize has given me, for the first time in my life, the feeling that my literature could be appreciated on an international level."
"One effect that the Nobel Prize seems to have had is that more Arabic literary works have been translated into other languages."
"I accepted the interviews and encounters that had to be held with the media, but I would have preferred to work in peace."
"I was suffering from a peculiar and persistent sense that I was being pursued, and also the conviction that under the political order of the times, our lives had no meaning."
"The Koran and the laws of all civilized nations legislate against the vilification of religions."
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