History Quotes - Page 3

Have you noticed how just trying to impose any sort of chronology on events makes it seem as though a lot of time has been occupied?

...history should continually seek to challenge our assumptions. It should prompt us to look differently at the world and make us less self-assured about our own ideals and beliefs.

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

Jean-Baptiste Say may have coined the term 'entrepreneur' but he totally missed the opportunity to put it on a t-shirt and sell it.

I am writing history, and I can't be there.

History that is presented only as ink-embalmed data is as a flower pressed in a book. Although the dry petals still hold all the elements of the original flower, they cannot show us how it looked blooming in the field. The color and fragrance - the true reality - or the flowers are gone.

Dixon was not unconscious of this awed reverence which was given to her; nor did she dislike it; it flattered her as much as Louis the Fourteenth was flattered by his courtiers shading their eyes from the dazzling light of his presence.

The chickens bounced onto the pink and purple bush and landed on Annika's head." It's funny because nobody has ever said that before. I should get an award or something because I just made history!

This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive.

World praises the amalgamation of conscious & unconscious, History is the testament.

Whatever you do today, impacts your historicity.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

Filled with existential ennui about your place in the universe? Get over yourself. Yes, you're an inconsequential worm in the grand scope of history. But you're an inconsequential worm who makes shit up for a living, which means that you don't have to lift heavy boxes or ask people if they want fries with that. Grow up and get back to work.

History tends to play games with the truth, but at least it does so with a flourish.

History is full of blank spaces, but good stories, invariably, are not.

In crime books it's possible to chart forensic technology by how well it has to be explained to a reader. In mid-Victorian crime novels fingerprinting has to be explained because it's new. Nowadays it's part of our world and we can simply assume that knowledge if we write about it.

History makes my mouth water - and that is as much because of the voids in what documentation remains as what is set in stone.

Archive material is a fabulous starting point - individual documents are like signposted roads, heading to a variety of intriguing possibilities.