History Quotes - Page 14

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.

Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell; and George the Third — ['Treason!' cried the Speaker] — may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it.

In general, life is better than it has ever been, and if you think that, in the past, there was some golden age of pleasure and plenty to which you would, if you were able, transport yourself, let me say one single word : Dentistry.

History is the study of lies, anyway, because no witness ever recalls events with total accuracy, not even eyewitnesses.

History is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life.

Don't be shocked when your history book mentions me.

Architecture and war are not incompatible. Architecture is war. War is architecture. I am at war with my time, with history, with all authority that resides in fixed and frightened forms.

The consciousness of the past weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

Treason doth never prosper. What's the reason? Why, when it prospers, none dare call it treason.

Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called equality.

Russians can give you arms but only the United States can give you a solution.

The thing I am most aware of is my limits. And this is natural; for I never, or almost never, occupy the middle of my cage; my whole being surges toward the bars.

One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

One never really knows how much one has been touched by a place until one has left it.

History is the ship carrying living memories to the future.

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?

That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it.

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.

The man for whom history is bunk is almost invariably as obtuse to the future as he is blind to the past.

The great artists are those who impose their personal vision upon humanity.

Since historical reconstruction is a rational process, only justified and indeed possible if it involves the human reason, what we call history is the mess we call life reduced to some order. pattern and possibly purpose.

"The sounds of people drowning are something that I can not describe to you, and neither can anyone else. It's the most dreadful sound and there is a terrible silence that follows it."

The economic interpretation of history does not necessarily mean that all events are determined solely by economic forces. It simply means that economic facts are the ever recurring decisive forces, the chief points in the process of history.

The art of creation is older than the art of killing.