History Quotes

The young are often savvy in the cultural world but not so much the intellectual, the old the intellectual but not so much the cultural. But I tell you those who do the most damage during an era are very much aware of both.

~ Criss Jami

The philosopher cannot seriously put to himself questions that his civilization has not lived.

~ William Barrett

Preserving cultural diversity is considered a supreme virtue today, but the members of the diverse subcultures don't always see it that way. People have wants and needs, and when cultures rub shoulders, people in one culture are bound to notice when their neighbors are satisfying those those desires better than they are. When they do notice, history tells us, they shamelessly borrow wherever works best.

~ Hafiz

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

~ Davis Bunn

America is the world's top war-master, the most sophisticated killer-culture in history.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Food is everything we are. It's an extension of nationalist feeling, ethnic feeling, your personal history, your province, your region, your tribe, your grandma. It's inseparable from those from the get-go.

~ Anthony Bourdain

The nationalist regrets the change, an ill-founded belief in the merits of purity blinds him to the virtues of the foreign and the hybrid.

~ C.v. Wedgwood

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

~ David Halberstam

Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

~ Konrad Lorenz

Author complains about the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

~ George F. Will

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...

~ Edward Abbey

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.

~ Richard Handler

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.

~ G.k. Chesterton

It is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who will bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. Even though these values cannot be achieved, it does not mean that they amount to mere “ideas.” These are MEASURES…. Let people of our time talk about these things with condescension as if they were anachronistic and anti-historical; we know that this is an alibi for their defeat. Let us leave modern men to their “truths” and let us only be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins.

~ Julius Evola

Truly a good horse, good ground to gallop on, and sunshine, make up the sum of enjoyable travelling.

~ Isabella L. Bird

Japanese had never seen a Western-style circus, and most of them had probably never seen foreigners, either.

~ Frederik L. Schodt

He did not care about titles and was proud to be a farmer beyond all else.

~ Tsuneichi Miyamoto

The Fukushima nuclear complex went on to become the worst man-made engineering disaster in all of human history, outside of war.

~ Steven Magee

Genius and science have burst the limits of space, and few observations, explained by just reasoning, have unveiled the mechanism of the universe. Would it not also be glorious for man to burst the limits of time, and, by a few observations, to ascertain the history of this world, and the series of events which preceded the birth of the human race?

~ Georges Cuvier

The sublime can only be found in the great subjects. Poetry, history and philosophy all have the same object, and a very great object—Man and Nature. Philosophy describes and depicts Nature. Poetry paints and embellishes it. It also paints men, it aggrandizes them, it exaggerates them, it creates heroes and gods. History only depicts man, and paints him such as he is.

~ Georges-Louis Leclerc

All of the great mastermind thinkers throughout history have known that we become our thoughts.

~ Bryant Mcgill

Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.

~ John Brockman

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

~ Zadie Smith

I was brought up Christian, then I was agnostic and then I realized I was atheist... This movie [Agora] is about fundamentalism and hate.

~ Alejandro Amenábar

One enjoys the good things more to the extent that one goes to them after having labored in advance, for labors are a sauce for good things

~ Xenphon Ephesius

for that men have been good does not suffice for them to continue being good, unless one cares about it to the end.

~ Xenphon Ephesius

I have come to the conclusion that none of us in our generation feels as guilty about sin as we should or as our forefathers did.

~ Francis A. Schaeffer

If you study a historical episode and feel good about it, it probably means that you haven't had it explained very well. Historical conflict is usually the struggle of different conceptions of what is good.

~ Patrick N. Allitt

It should be some kind of goal to be absolutely clear about your past experiences and have let them all go and accepted them in full.

~ Auliq Ice

But some memories are more important than others,' she says. 'Because some memories belong to more than just one other person...Some memories tell us about who we are. They need to be kept safe so that things can change for all of us

~ Anna Smaill

Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories.

~ Miranda Richmond Mouillot

Whether you need to remember the past or not, It changes nothing but gives the best choice for the future that makes You always to remember your past.

~ Auliq Ice

Stories about lives remembered bring us backward while allowing us to move forward.

~ Nina Sankovitch

The question is, shall it or shall it not be linear history. I've always thought a kaleidoscopic view might be an interesting heresey. Shake the tube and see what comes out. Chronology irritates me. There is no chronology inside my head. I am composed of myriad Claudias who spin and mix and part like sparks of sunlight on water. The pack of cards I carry around is forever shuffled and re-shuffled; there is no sequence, everything happens at once. The machines of the new technology, I understand, perform in much the same way: all knowledge is stored, to be summoned up at the flick of a key. They sound, in theory, more efficient. Some of my keys don't work; others demand pass-words, codes, random unlocking sequences. The collective past, curiously, provides these. It is public property, but it is also deeply private. We all look differently at it. My Victorians are not your Victorians. My seventeenth century is not yours. The voice of John Aubrey, of Darwin, of whoever you like, speaks in one tone to me, in another to you.

~ Penelope Lively

When humans began cultivating the land, they thought that the extra work this required will pay off. 'Yes, we will have to work harder. But the harvest will be so bountiful! We won't have to worry any more about lean years. Our children will never go to sleep hungry.' It made sense.If you worked harder, you would have a better life. That was the plan.The first part of the plan went smoothly. People indeed worked harder. But people did not foresee that the number of children would increase, meaning that the extra wheat would have to be shared between more children.Neither did the early farmers understand that feeding children with more porridge and less breast milk would weaken their immune system, and that permanent settlements would be hotbeds for infectious diseases.They did not foresee that by increasing their dependence on a single source of food, they were actually exposing themselves even more to the depredations of drought. Nor did the farmers foresee that in good years their bulging granaries would tempt thieves and enemies, compelling them to start building walls and doing guard duty.

~ Yuval Noah Harari

If miracles represent prophecy, we must have more prophets in twenty first century than the entire human history.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

Well, in war, you can only be killed once. But in politics, many times.

~ Winston S. Churchill

Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can't. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.

~ Timothy Findley

It is surprising how many great men started out as horse thieves.

~ P.j. Sullivan

Nations, like men, are wary of truth, for truth is too often not beautiful.

~ Addison Gayle Jr.