"When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."

History, Ideas, Leading, Spirits

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"When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."

Exlpore more History quotes

"History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes."

Voltaire, French Writer

History,

"There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse."

Cormac McCarthy, American Writer

History, Violence, War, Death, Suffering

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

History, Men, Women, Opposition

"By studying human history, we can realize how much of human stupidity has fallen on fertile ground. Is gravity guilty for such an occurrence too?"

Eraldo Banovac, Croatian Scientist

History, Stupidity, Humanity, Irony

"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."

Henry David Thoreau, American Author

History, Printing, Years

"The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny."

Jim Butcher, American Author

History, Individual, Decision, Power

"The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities."

Susan Sontag, American Author

History, Exhaustion, Man, Possibilities

"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."

William Faulkner, American Novelist

History, Letters, People, Blood, Passion

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

Joseph Conrad, Polish Novelist

History, Conquest, Earth, Noses, Pretty

"The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past."

Barack Obama, American President

History, Colonialism, Past, Identity

Explore more quotes by M. H. Abrams

"The survival of artistic modes in which we recognize ourselves, identify ourselves and place ourselves will survive as long as humanity survives."

Survival, Humanity, Will

"Key metaphors help determine what and how we perceive and how we think about our perceptions."

Help, Key, Metaphors, Perceptions

"John Updike is always fun. And one of my former students, Tom Pynchon. And Harold Bloom, another former student."

Fun, Students

"The theories of the major philosophers of the 18th century secular enlightenment were biblical and theological in spite of themselves."

Philosophy, Theories

"If you read quickly to get through a poem to what it means, you have missed the body of the poem."

Body,

"When I was a graduate student, the leading spirits at Harvard were interested in the history of ideas."

History, Ideas, Leading, Spirits

"We worked on solving the problem of voice communications in a noisy military environment. We established military codes that are highly audible and invented selection tests for personnel who had a superior ability to recognize sound in a noisy background."

Ability, Environment, Military, Sound

"It's amazing how, age after age, in country after country, and in all languages, Shakespeare emerges as incomparable."

Age, Country, Shakespeare

"Hard work makes easy reading or, at least, easier reading."

Reading, Work, Hardwork

"When something startlingly new comes up, young people, especially, seize it. You can't complain about that. I think its heyday has passed, but it's had an effect and will continue to have an effect."

People, Effect, Will