History Quotes - Page 16

Your life is a screenplay, you must be the author; direct and make it a success.

[I]f we revert to history, we shall find that the women who have distinguished themselves have neither been the most beautiful nor the most gentle of their sex.

if reason ruled the world would history even exist?

Like a lot of stupid people, it took a great deal to get an idea into the king's head, but once there, there was no shifting it.

Ujasusi ni kitu cha muhimu kwa maendeleo ya nchi yoyote. Watu wanaoshughulika na ujasusi wanapaswa kuwa makini mno kwani kazi yao ni nyeti sana kulinganisha na kazi za watu wengine. Kosa dogo la kiusalama linaweza kubadili mwelekeo wa historia ya nchi.

This Earle of Oxford, making of his low obeisance to Queen Elizabeth, happened to let a Fart, at which he was so abashed and ashamed that he went to Travell, 7 yeares. On his returne the Queen welcomed him home, and sayd, My Lord, I had forgott the Fart.

There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.

The Guti were a band of mountain barbarians. It's always the way, isn't it? Everything is blamed on 'the barbarians

I sound contemptuous, but I am not. I am interested-intrigued even-by the way time erases real lives, leaving only vague imprints. Blood and spirit fade away so that only names and dates remain.

As a breath on glass, -
As witch-fires that burn,
The gods and monsters pass,
Are dust, and return.
(“The Face of the Skies”)

This was long before the term 'single-parent family' came into use; back then it was a 'broken home'...

History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.

We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.

The pathway traced with blood and tears,
and dust of all our father's dead,
Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,
Fade to the mist of nameless years.
(“The Testimony of the Suns”)

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.

A little while, their hunger unfulfilled,
The mothlike worlds flit 'round the guttering sun.
("Ephemera")

It’s quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will…

He did not waste time in a vain search for a place in history.

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time's malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing-until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return.

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.