1,795 quotes found
“Science uses the Red Shift to measure deep cosmic distances. But how to measure deep historic time? How aboutthe Saffron Shift.If history itself had a color, it is . . . like wood or bark, or livin...”
“History isn't written by the winners - it's written by everyone - it's a jigsaw of facts from contradictory sources. But every once in a while, you unearth that one original document that no one ca...”
“Revolutionaries - true revolutionaries - are aggressive, ruthless, and generally seize the main chance, as William Henry Drayton did when he saw that stump-speaking was getting him nowhere. But def...”
“Sing, boy! sing! The ages are waiting for you. Sing! sing! All the world will hear you. God knows what will come of it.”
“[Alon Johnson] Later wrote that, "coming through a battered building near a well known and dangerous doorway. I heard something unfamiliar -- the sound of excited voices somewhere in the distance. ...”
“History is simply what's behind us.”
“I have seen purer liquors, better segars, finer tobacco, truer guns and pistols, larger dirks and bowie knives, and prettier courtesans here in San Francisco than in any other place I have ever vis...”
“Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.”
“After 1656 the Dutch, who had gained control over the Moluccas, chose the islands that could be most easily defended. They then burned all the nutmeg trees on the other islands to make sure no one ...”
“His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.”
“If writers only dared to dare, a Suetonius or a Tacitus of the Novel could exist, for the Novel is essentially the history of manners, turned into a story and a play, as is History itself often eno...”
“The early settlers amazed her--they had pluck, they led lives of sweaty drama. Theirs was a world of corsets and whipping posts and indentured servitude. People worked the land and died in ungainly...”
“The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us ...”
“Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries ...”
“One cannot launch a new history the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, ...”
“When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn't realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that i...”
“Human history is full of great men, great women, individuals, with the will for power - all of them with governesses like her.”
“The psychosphere, the logosphere, is permeated by concepts, ideas, verbalizations, a whole apparatus devised, or rather evolved, to form some sort of mental contact with reality--or to block it off...”
“Anything the Austrians could do, the Prussians could do better.”
“The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma”
