History Quotes - Page 35

Empires rise and fall like the abdomen of God. It's just the universe breathing.

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.

Whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow the truth too near the heels it may haply strike out his teeth.

History should be written as philosophy.

My world did not shrink because I was a black female writer. It just got bigger.

I don't pretend to understand the Universe - it's a great deal bigger than I am.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

The irony about Charles II is not that he came to the throne because England needed a successor to Charles I, but because England needed a successor to Oliver Cromwell.

Because of my personal history, my professional skills and my business achievements, I am a man nobody can expect to compare himself with.

An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view.

Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings.

The Beatles are the most credible band in the history of music.

The value of history. ..is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

Every new generation must rewrite history in its own way.

[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.

To be matter-of-fact about the world is to blunder into fantasy - and dull fantasy at that, as the real world is strange and wonderful.

No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly.

Historians of literature like to regard a century as a series of ten faces, each grimacing in a different way.

History is an argument without end.

None of us wanted to be the bass player. In our minds he was the fat guy who always played at the back.

The Declaration of Independence is a sacred part of American history.

Literature is the expression of a feeling of deprivation, a recourse against a sense of something missing. But the contrary is also true: language is what makes us human. It is a recourse against the meaningless noise and silence of nature and history.

History studies not just facts and institutions, its real subject is the human spirit.

Today it is fashionable to talk about the poor. Unfortunately, it is not fashionable to talk with them.

Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it.