Historical Quotes - Page 26

My likely historical significance is a terrible burden. ~ Calvin

There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of.

All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition.

Most actors are drawn towards historical tellings because it's one of the most simple forms of storytelling.

In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques is true?

The thing people forget when they are looking for solutions is there is nothing final in history.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

Swedes, we are not - Russians, we do not want to become ... so let us be Finnish.

To secure your historical standing, be sure you are the first to write about it.

The research in Ralph Keyes' The Quote Verifier is impressive, and each conclusion is like the solution to a real-life historical mystery. Who knew a reference book could be so entertaining?

Paul created a theology of which none but the vaguest warrants can be found in the words of Christ.

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon

Life cannot be destroyed for good, neithercan history be brought entirely to a halt. A secret streamlet trickles on beneath the heavy lid of inertia and pseudo-events, slowly and inconspicuously undercutting it. It may be a long process, but one day it must happen: the lid will no longer hold and will start to crack. This is the moment when something once more begins visibly to happen, something truly new and uniquesomething truly historical, in the sense that history again demands to be heard.

Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.

The United States of America will sound as pompously in the world or in history as The Kingdom of Great Britain.

History is rooted in the future

This is what I believe: That we are not pushed from behind by the casual unfolding of historical necessity, but that we are in the grip of an attractor of some sort, which lies ahead of us in time.

Saying that the origin of the Islamic State (IS) is within the Muslim Brotherhood organisation only strengthens IS. This is what the Israeli government asserts when claiming that Hamas and IS are the exact same thing. By saying so, the historical resistance [against the Israeli occupation] is viewed as unlawful, called extremism and terrorism.

Current utility and historical origin are different subjects.

Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.

I've never known, at least a modern historical instance, where the truth wasn't superior to distortion in every way.

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities.