Historical Quotes - Page 28

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

The study of History is the best medicine for a sick mind.

As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.

Only fools mistake politicians for messiahs.

"Natural" man is always there, under the changeable historical man. We call him and he comes-a little sleepy, benumbed, without his lost form of instinctive hunter, but, after all, still alive. Natural man is first prehistoric man-the hunter.

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

Somewhat by historical happenstance the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China - also were the original five countries to have nuclear weapons.

My visitors say they noticed perfumes from different companies in my fridge, and ask what I need these for. I explain that they are mainly there as historical benchmarks of quality, below which I must not and would not want to fall.

It is this conception of the unity of the human career which is perhaps the greatest achievement of historical study, since it gained a place analogous to that of natural science.

Boredom and fatigue are great historical forces.

They [Arabs] wanted to catch up with the modern world. The West appreciated that, but was more interested in colonies, markets, and spheres of influence. Such is the way in which historical forces operate: the give and take between nations, as between cultures, is no simple exchange

The assassination at Sarajevo was certainly the crucial precedent of the European war that its conspirators had sought, but was not the historical cause ... The assassination acted as a lever, prying the various powers into predictable paths.

Lincoln would be just like me. He wouldn't know what the hell to do.

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

What religion a man shall have is a historical accident, quite as much as what language he shall speak.

The four great motives for writing prose are sheer egoism, esthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse, and political purpose.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

I've worked a lot of historical stuff back in Sweden and there's always conflict with horses. I get a bit paranoid when I'm on them, and they can sense that and they get a bit paranoid. It ends up in this bad spiral where I don't want to be on them, and they don't want me on their backs.

The really historical performance would talk to ghosts.

The history of an art is the history of masterwork, not of failures, or mediocrity.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

The historical approach to understanding of scientific fact is what differentiates the scholar in science from the mere experimenter.

I love England and the historical aspect of it.

And this is the best chance to begin to establish the New World Order.

We need a common enemy to unite us.