History Quotes - Page 41

History is but a confused heap of facts.

No revolution creates a wholly new universe. Rather, it reflects the history and culture that spawned it.

Kings are the slaves of history.

History is merely a list of surprises... It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.

But it's the truth even if it didn't happen.

Someone once said "Don't try to be a great man. Just be a man, and let history make its own judgements."

The heart prefers to move against the grain of circumstance; perversity is the souls very life.

If peace cannot be maintained with honour, it is no longer peace.

Politics are vulgar when they are not liberalised by history, and history fades into mere literature when it loses sight of its relation to practical politics.

The public history of all countries, and all ages, is but a sort of mask, richly colored. The interior working of the machinery must be foul.

History is a record of exploded ideas.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

Why waste words? Geometry existed before the Creation, is co-eternal with the mind of God, is God himself (what exists in God that is not God himself?): geometry provided God with a model for the Creation and was implanted into man, together with God's own likeness - and not merely conveyed to his mind through the eyes.

We are living in a demented world. And we know it. It would not come as a surprise to anyone if tomorrow the madness gave way to afrenzy which would leave our poor Europe in a state of distracted stupor, with engines still turning and flags streaming in the breeze, but with the spirit gone.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

The poet never asks for admiration; he wants to be believed.

Great art is an instant arrested in eternity.

History ... may be regarded as an artificial extension and : broadening of our memories and may be used to overcome the natural bewilderment of all unfamiliar situations.

I do not like this word "bomb." It is not a bomb. It is a device that is exploding.

History is now strictly organized, powerfully disciplined, but it possesses only a modest educational value and even less conscious social purpose.

The past has always been the handmaid of authority.

Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

To the extent that the judicial profession becomes the daily routine of deciding cases on the most secure precedents and the narrowest grounds available, the judicial mind atrophies and its perspective shrinks.

The Supreme Court's only armor is the cloak of public trust; its sole ammunition, the collective hopes of our society.