History Quotes - Page 33

What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

War is an option of difficulties.

The aim of the historian, like that of the artist, is to enlarge our picture of the world, to give us a new way of looking at things.

A building does not have to be an important work of architecture to become a first-rate landmark. Landmarks are not created by architects. They are fashioned by those who encounter them after they are built. The essential feature of a landmark is not its design, but the place it holds in a city's memory. Compared to the place it occupies in social history, a landmark's artistic qualities are incidental.

A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood.

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

Zionism is the most stupendous fallacy in Jewish history

History is only a catalogue of the forgotten.

History will die if not irritated. The only service I can do to my profession is to serve as a flea.

Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.

Crude classifications and false generalizations are the curse of the organized life.

I knew German history well, and out of my experiences in the rest of the world I believed to know the German kind; therefore I never doubted that, although for the time being all indications were against it, one day a change would come.

"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.

Pour faire de l'histoire, il faut savoir compter.

Through searching out origins, one becomes a crab. The historian looks backwards, and finally he also believes backwards.

It is bad luck for world history that of all people the Russians adopted Communism, because they are totally unfit for it.

We should always be aware that what now lies in the past once lay in the future.

Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes.

History is not a pattern-book of fossilized ideologies.

We get our ethics from our history and judge our history by our ethics.

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know.

All Cretans are liars.

Through the centuries, the history of peoples is but a lesson in mutual tolerance.

Julian sincerely abhorred the system of oriental despotism which Diocletian, Constantine, and the patient habits of four score years, had established in the empire. A motive of superstition prevented the execution of the design which Julian had frequently meditated, of relieving his head from the weight of a costly diadem; but he absolutely refused the title of Dominus or Lord, a word which was grown so familiar to the ears of the Romans, that they no longer remembered its servile and humiliating origin.