1,795 quotes found
“I am the keeper of my husband's history.”
“Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.”
“Legendary innovators like Franklin, Snow, and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualitiesa certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiositybut they also share one other defining attribute. ...”
“The contrast between the familiar and the exceptional was everywhere around me. A bullock cart was drawn up beside a modern sports car at a traffic signal. A man squatted to relieve himself behind ...”
“If we cannot agree on what was important yesterday, what more on events that happened a hundred or three hundred years ago? The point here is that history is open ended and we cannot be sure about ...”
“Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?”
“Sometimes history cleaves and for one helpless moment stands still like the pause when the ax splits a log and the two halves rest on end waiting to fall.”
“little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, Here it is we kept it for you.”
“Rhino-mounted Bantu shock troops could have overthrown the Roman Empire. It never happened.”
“The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.”
“News is only the first rough draft of history.”
“Great persons, like great empires, leave their mark on history.”
“History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.”
“The ascendancy over men's minds of the ruins of the stupendous past, the past of history, legend and myth, at once factual and fantastic, stretching back and back into ages that can but be surmised...”
“It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the cl...”
“The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.”
“History is but the record of the public and official acts of human beings. It is our object, therefore, to humanize our history and deal with people past and present; people who ate and possibly dr...”
“He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his life in jo...”
“Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future ca...”
“Many in America, as one social historian wrote, 'believed implicitly that New York's social leaders went to bed in full evening dress, brushed their teeth in vintage champagne, married their daught...”
