History Quotes - Page 7

But love, like the sun that it is, sets afire and melts everything. what greed and privilege to build up over whole centuries the indignation of a pious spirit, with its natural following of oppressed souls, will cast down with a single shove.

I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

Call no man happy until he is dead.

Love is our most unifying and empowering common spiritual denominator. The more we ignore its potential to bring greater balance and deeper meaning to human existence, the more likely we are to continue to define history as one long inglorious record of man’s inhumanity to man.

What one generation finds ridiculous, the next accepts; and the third shudders when it looks back on what the first did.

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don't you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life's business.

Where humanity
sowed faith, hope, and unity,
joy’s garden blossomed.

As individuals express their life, so they are.

The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.

History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.”
-from Past Present and Future are One

I wanted that future officer to weigh decisions with a supple mind and to be comfortable with nuance and uncertainty.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn't life's business to reward merit, why should it be life's business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

This only is denied to God: the power to undo the past.

[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots.

The soul becomes dyed with the colour of its thoughts.

He who doesn't understand history is doomed to repeat it.

The Master said, “A true teacher is one who, keeping the past alive, is also able to understand the present.”
(Analects 2.11)

Going down in history is a dead end pursuit

There are three kind of history. The first is what really happened and that is forever lost. The second is what most people thought happened, and we can recover that with assiduous effort. The third is what the people in power wanted the future to think happened and that is 90 percent of the history in books.