Historical Quotes - Page 14

Every ounce of my cynicism is supported by historical precedent.

Death confronts us not unlike the historical battle scene that hangs on the wall of the classroom. It is our task to obscure or quite obliterate the picture by our deeds while we are still in this world.

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science.

According to Marx, socialism is the first stage of communism and it covers a very long historical period in which we must practise the principle "to each according to his work" and combine the interests of the state, the collective and the individual, for only thus can we arouse people's enthusiasm for labour and develop socialist production.

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

We are in danger of being overwhelmed with irredeemable paper, mere paper, representing not gold nor silver; no sir, representing nothing but broken promises, bad faith, bankrupt corporations, cheated creditors and a ruined people.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

A Republic, if you can keep it.

The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.

There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.

There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

I feel a great responsibility playing a historical figure because whether they were good or bad, I feel like the person deserves a fair shake. It's like being the executor of their estate in some ways.

And it also became clear that these conditions of inequality and historical injustice have given rise to a feeling of hate in the world - a deeply felt hate that cannot easily be overcome with a few good words.

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

Too many historical writers are the votaries of cults, which, by definition are dedicated to whitewashing warts and hanging halos.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

Memmius would only be useless to him for a short time, but that he would remain useless to himself and the Republic forever.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

Our country's founders cherished liberty, not democracy.

The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or another.

The library is not a shrine for the worship of books. It is not a temple where literary incense must be burned or where one's one devotion to the bound book is expressed in ritual. A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas - a place where history comes to life.

Learning history is easy; learning its lessons seems almost impossibly difficult.

Before passage of this [Federal Reserve] Act, the New York Bankers could only dominate the reserves of New York. Now, we are able to dominate the bank reserves of the entire country.

Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

The postmodern worldview denies that there is such a thing as truth: historical, moral, or otherwise. It denies that truth exists independently of our perspectives and interests.