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History Quotes
"My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past."
9
"This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out of the same man it makes two different phantoms, and the one attacks and punishes the other, the darkness of the despot struggles with the splendor of the captain. Hence a truer measure in the final judgment of the nations. Babylon violated diminishes Alexander; Rome enslaved diminishes Caesar; massacred Jerusalem diminishes Titus. Tyranny follows the tyrant. Woe to the man who leaves behind a shadow that bears his form."
9
"Humans are intelligent and resourceful. If we've been around a million or more years, why are we so disinclined to believe that we could have built cities 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 or even more years ago?"
9
"The whole of history is the history of murderers. If you become a murderer, fame will be very easy. You can become a prime minister, you can become a president-but these are all masks. Behind them you will find very violent people, terribly violent people hiding, smiling. Those smiles are political, diplomatic. If the mask slips, you will always see Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Nadir Shah, Napoleon, Alexander, Hitler, hiding behind."
9
"Music and symbols, they're older than human race.Prehuman beings used them to teach early mankind."
9
"Didn't young people care what the generation before them had achieved? And if not, why had everyone gone through those grim difficult wartime years?"
9
"When my country, into which I had just set my foot, was set on fire about my ears, it was time to stir. It was time for every man to stir."
9
"More than half of our history is lost, not because they were not documented, but they had no guardians and protectors."
9
"Americans are rising to the tasks of history, and they expect the same of us."
9
"It wasn't aliens that first made us gear up for war, it was our fellow humans."
9
"I know now that all people hunger for a noble, unsullied past, that as sure as the black nationalist dreams of a sublime Africa before the white man's corruption, so did Thomas Jefferson dream of an idyllic Britain before the Normans, so do all of us dream of some other time when things were so simple. I know now that that hunger is a retreat from the knotty present into myth and that what ultimately awaits those who retreat into fairy tales, who seek refuge in the mad pursuit to be made great again, in the image of greatness that never was, is tragedy."
9
"Every past is worth condemning."
9
"Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals."
9
"We look wishfully to emergencies to eventful revolutionary times ... and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads."
9
"During the Cold War of the 1950s, American spies were issued eyeglasses with thick, clunky frames. If captured, they were trained to casually chew the curved earpieces, where fatal doses of cyanide were cast inside the plastic. It's these same horn-rimmed suicide glasses, the wrangler says, that inspired the look of Buddy Holly and Elvis Costello. All those young hipsters wearing death on their nose."
9
"We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes."
9
"I sometimes try to imagine what future historians will say about us. They'll be able to sum up modern man in a single sentence: he fornicated and read the papers. After that robust description, I should guess there will be no more to say on the subject."
9
"Once upon a time, there was a civilization in the eastern side of the world. It was one of the most advanced civilizations on the planet that existed during that time.This civilization was the glorious Indus valley civilization. No, I am not talking about India. I am talking about the land of greatness that got lost in time. Today, in the same geographical location of that great civilization, we have a piece of earth, which is known as "India. But do not mistake it to be the same glorious land that existed thousands of years ago, along with other magnificent civilizations, such as the Greeks, the Mayans, the Egyptians, the Babylonians etc."
9
"By the rude bridge that arched the flood, Their flag to April's breeze unfurled, Here once the embattled farmers stood, And fired the shot heard round the world. The foe long since in silence slept; Alike the conqueror silent sleeps; And Time the ruined bridge has swept, Down the dark stream which seaward creeps. On this green bank, by this soft stream, We set to-day a votive stone; That memory may their deed redeem, When, like our sires, our sons are gone. Spirit, that made those heroes dare, To die, and leave their children free, Bid Time and Nature gently spare, The shaft we raise to them and thee."
9
"Robbing people of their actual history is the same as robbing them of part of themselves. It's a crime."Fuka-Eri thought about that for a moment.Tengo went on, "Our memory is made up of our individual memories and our collective memories. The two are intimately linked. And history is our collective memory. If our collective memory is taken from us - is rewritten - we lose the ability to sustain our true selves."
9
"The only lesson you can learn from history is that it repeats itself."
9
"Napoleon Hill also rehashed 'thoughts create things' when he wrote Think & Grow Rich in 1937 (although it had taken him 25 years to complete)."
9
"When I graduated from high school, it was during the Depression and we had no money."
9
"Britain will be honoured by historians more for the way she disposed of an empire than for the way in which she acquired it."
9
"Jesus Christ, from Nazareth was a glorious man in human history " a man filled with love, compassion and purity of conscience."
9
"Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views-even the awful ones-improve with age."
9
"Religious fundamentalists belong in a museum at the exhibit of medieval antiquities, not in any nation."
9
"John Kenneth Galbraith and Marshall McLuhan are the two greatest modern Canadians that the U.S. has produced."
9
"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written."
8
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