History Quotes - Page 63

This I hold to be the chief office of history, to rescue virtuous actions from the oblivion to which a want of records would consign them, and that men should feel a dread of being considered infamous in the opinions of posterity, from their depraved expressions and base actions.

We investigate the past not to deduce practical political lessons, but to find out what really happened.

The development of beings with minds is probably the highest individuation the world has ever known, and its prehistory is the history of life on earth.

The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction - as if one were obliged to choose between them.

History does include aspects of directionality, and the present range of causes and phenomena does not exhaust the realm of past possibilities.

If we are still here to witness the destruction of our planet some five billion years or more hence, then we will have achieved something so unprecedented in the history of life that we should be willing to sing our swansong with joy - Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Against my will, I became a witness to the most terrible defeat of reason and to the most savage triumph of brutality ever chroniclednever before did a generation suffer such a moral setback after it had attained such intellectual heights.

But in the intellectual world, there is room for all opposing forces: even that which never appears victorious in the real world continues to be effective as a dynamic force (in the intellectual world) and precisely the unfulfilled ideals prove to be the most invincible.

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.

Ages employed in making history have no time for studying it.

it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

In the end, history, especially British history with its succession of thrilling illuminations, should be, as all her most accomplished narrators have promised, not just instruction but pleasure.

Without history we are infants. Ask what binds the British Isles more closely to America than to Europe and only history gives a reply. Of all intellectual pursuits, history is the most supremely useful. That is why people crave it and need ever more of it.

Those Victorians: endlessly fascinating, broad in their learning, heroic in their achievements, in parts completely mad.

A waste land lit by holy candles.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir.

I was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history. I was the only one who was right about one of the most significant issues in modern American history.

Well, everybody has a history.

You know what? I didn't mess up about Paul Revere... In a shout-out, gotcha type of question that was asked of me, I answered candidly. And I know my American history.

So I left him there alone to watch history repeat the same events retold again and again on his own.

If people could learn history, what lessons it might teach us!

If a man could say nothing against a character but what he can prove, history could not be written.

This is my history; like all other histories, a narrative of misery.

All history was at first oral.