History Quotes

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.(Ephemera)

~ George Sterling

It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…

~ Vladimir Odoyevsky

we may say that History develops, Art stands still

~ E.m. Forster

He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.

~ Dejan Stojanovic

The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it held for her, a mystery felt most strongly on a bell-chimed Sunday on her solitary exploration of its hidden alleys and squares? Time had fascinated her from childhood, its apparent power to move at different speeds, the dissolution it wrought on minds and bodies, her sense that each moment, all moments past and those to come, were fused into an illusory present which with every breath became the unalterable, indestructible past. In the City of London these moments were caught and solidified in stone and brick, in churches and monuments and in bridges which spanned the grey-brown ever-flowing Thames. She would walk out in spring or summer as early as six o'clock, double-locking the front door behind her, stepping into a silence more profound and mysterious than the absence of noise. Sometimes in this solitary perambulation it seenmed that her own footsteps were muted, as if some part of her were afraid to waken the dead who had walked thse streets and had known the same silence.

~ P.d. James

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing--until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

~ Julian Barnes

Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides.

~ Ernst Jünger

The past and the present are after all so close, so almost one, as if time were an artificial teasing out of a material which longs to join, to interpenetrate, and to become heavy and very small like some of those heavenly bodies scientists tell us of.

~ Iris Murdoch

When we return to our elementary school playground or the site of our first kiss, we're dropping in on our own history years later. Visiting those same places in the present not only collapses time, but also memory.

~ Kevin Smokler

You will leave your foot print in the sand of history if you understand and apply the power of time conversion.

~ Sunday Adelaja

The secret of all the great men and women in history is that they converted their time into tangible products.

~ Sunday Adelaja

There is no great person in history who gained mastery in a particular skill without first investing so much time into perfecting that skill.

~ Sunday Adelaja

You can leave your mark in the sand of history just by discovering the secrets of greatness through time conversion.

~ Sunday Adelaja

But time is like that, it’s a bitter acquaintance that no matter how hard one tries to fight it one can’t. One always is bound to its constantly ticking onward and even though many have wanted to bottle it, it just couldn’t be done.

~ Anna Aquino

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evalua­ tion of the interrelationships among the components of the present- day society.

~ Claude Lévi-Strauss

there are between life partners sliding layers of history, tectonic plates of it shifting over the decades together.

~ Helen Simpson

There has never been a time in human history where so many people routinely carry recording and surveillance devices.

~ Steven Magee

Heresy no longer existed within religion itwas founded in the state.

~ Reinhart Koselleck

Just this past summer, I took online courses in introductory logic and law through civilization. Often the weight of history, with its facts heaped upon facts requiring complex chains of inference to sort through – I mean complex for someone with the soft brain of a tomato merchant; for me the premises are obvious and the conclusions dire and inescapable – threatened to crush me, and I was ultimately forced to abandon the whole undertaking. By way of recovery, I spent the rest of the summer immersed in a Freudian meditation on some choice tabloids. The mysterious lives of celebrities make for challenging induction. The reasoning process involves navigating many gaps in our knowledge of them. What is certain is that under the iceberg of glitz and glamor lie neurotic, depraved individuals with bizarre habits and hobbies, people who think they’re above the law.

~ Benson Bruno

The following is a list of statements made many years ago by experts in their fields. At the time they were said they sounded intelligent. With the passing of time, they sound idiotic.

~ Sean Covey

Remove yourself, sir!

~ David Mccullough

Tonight, history was going to be made. And it wasn't the discovery-of-radium, first-man-on-the-moon happy kind of history. It was the Spanish-Inquisition, here-comes-the-Hindenburg bad kind of history.

~ Eoin Colfer

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.

~ Thomas Henry Huxley

The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense.

~ Kedar Joshi

DNA has memory!

~ Isaiah Washington

When asked why he wrote the book, Freed said: In the 1980s, I joined the small group of anthropologists who were writing about the history of their subject. I believed that I could add some balance to American anthropological history, and that the best place to start was with museums—where the story began. The more I delved into the archives, the more I was fascinated. I was hooked.

~ Stanley A. Freed

I like to define biology as the history of the earth and all its life — past, present, and future. To understand biology is to understand that all life is linked to the earth from which it came; it is to understand that the stream of life, flowing out of the dim past into the uncertain future, is in reality a unified force, though composed of an infinite number and variety of separate lives.

~ Rachel Carson

So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.

~ Will Durant

I remembered the old doctor, - It would be interesting for science to watch the mental changes of individuals, on the spot. I felt I was becoming scientifically interesting.

~ Joseph Conrad

The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

~ Michael J. Findley

It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.

~ Thomas Pynchon

What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.

~ Wade Davis

Stopping in the 1970s, Hybridity as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the catastrophic situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.

~ Hannah Landecker

Science is a long history of learning how not to fool ourselves.

~ Richard Feynman

That's what drives science though: trying to find out the way things are, the way they were, and the way it really works. If that is your goal, then you want to make sure that your information is accurate, and if it's not, then it doesn't matter how much you liked that old urban legend or fictional factoid you once bought into. You will discard it, and be embarrassed by it, seeking instead for truth.

~ Aron Ra

Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.

~ Carl Sagan

The odds seemed pretty long from where I was standing, certainly, but then again, I reminded myself, the history of science was in many ways an almanac of highly unlikely victories.

~ Mark O'connell

When the rods were pushed back in and the clicking had died down, we suddenly experiences a let-down feeling, for all of us understood the language of the counter. Even though we had anticipated the success of the experiment, its accomplishment had a deep impact on us. For some time we had known that we were about to unlock a giant; still we could not escape an eerie feeling when we had actually done it. We felt as, I presume, everyone feels who has done something that he knowns will have very far-reaching consequences which he cannot foresee.

~ Eugene Wigner

As iron rusts when not used, and water gets foul from standing or turns to ice when exposed to cold, so the intellect degenerates without exercise.-Leonard Da Vinci

~ Leonardo Da Vinci

The development of the telescope marks, indeed, a new phase in human thought, a new vision of life. It is an extraordinary thing that the Greeks, with their lively and penetrating minds, never realized the possibilities of either microscope or telescope. They made no use of the lens. Yet they lived in a world in which glass had been known and had been made beautiful for hundreds of years; they had about them glass flasks and bottles, through which they must have caught glimpses of things distorted and enlarged. But science in Greece was pursued by philosophers in an aristocratic spirit, men who, with a few such exceptions as the ingenious Archimedes and Hiero, were too proud to learn from such mere artisans as jewellers and metal- and glass-workers.Ignorance is the first penalty of pride. The philosopher had no mechanical skill and the artisan had no philosophical education, and it was left for another age, more than a thousand years later, to bring together glass and the astronomer.(The Earth in Space and Time §1)

~ H.g. Wells