For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that...

Searching for wisdom in historic events requires an act of faith—a belief in the existence of recurrent patterns waiting to be discovered.

Martin Van Buren was a shitty guy. Not just because he was a bad president, and not just because he was pro-slavery. Van Buren was shitty in a very general sort of way. And with...

The ’80s were fabulous. The ’90s sucked, and the ’70s were just a sad, sad time in human history. Go 1980s! There’s something that’s just so cute about that time. And not just yellow nail...

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

But what is certain is that in five, ten or twenty years, this problem unique to our time, according to him, will no longer exist, it will be replaced by others…Yet this music, the sound...

If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief...

Orang mempelajari Islam untuk mengetahui apa sebenarnya Islam itu.

From time to time, I open a newspaper. Things seem to be proceeding at a dizzying rate. We are dancing not on the edge of a volcano, but on the wooden seat of a latrine,...

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they’re processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in...

Heroes didn’t win. The heroes were whoever happened to win. History told their story — the dead didn’t say a word. All of it was bullshit.

In a secular world, which is what most of us in Europe and North America live in, history takes on the role of showing us good and evil, virtues and vices. Religion no longer plays...

These are … sites that have a history of contamination, all of which are linked to massive neglect.

Although I am an anarch, I am not anti-authoritarian. Quite the opposite: I need authority, although I do not believe in it. My critical faculties are sharpened by the absence of the credibility that I...

Needless to say, food is used to constrain as well as to unify the members of many faiths. Most religions meddle in the day-to-day culinary habits of their adherents.

I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a...

La quantité de critiques reçues concernant tout sujet est inversement proportionnelle à la valeur exacte du sujet

It all pointed to history … either repeating itself, or trying to learn from history.

A curiosity: my name, Rem, will someday come to mean a line of text in a language spoken only by machines. Specifically, it will mean a line that the machines can safely ignore–one that’s only...

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is...

Brahma and AiravataLong ago in lands of golden sandBrahma turned to Saraswatiand gently kissed her inked hand….

History should be studied but not worshipped.

Appartenir à une patrie, c’est aussi s’engager pour le siècle où l’on y vit (source: émission sur la Russie sur Arte le 28/02/2012). Nos démocraties ne valent que par les hommes qui les servent. Elles...

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

U kršćanstvu doduše poznajemo kultnu anamnezu; no imamo li – barem u začecima – doista anamnetičku kulturu koja kultski spomen muke povezuje s našim povijesnim iskustvima te tako sprječava da muka na koncu bude slavljena...

Are you aware that humanity is just a blip? Not even a blip. Just a fraction of a fraction of what the universe has been and will become? Talk about perspective. I figure I can’t...

The past is a distant, receding coastline, and we are all in the same boat. Along the stern rail there is a line of telescopes; each brings the shore into focus at a given distance....

The Air Loom, for all its florid craziness, can be seen to have a function and a rationale: as a miraculous, if temporary, fix for a breaking mind, a coping strategy for a life that...

Yanked out of the present, Adam discovered the richness of the past in people’s stories.

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to...

Study history, Alleluia. In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn’t destiny any more. Economics is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny....

This is an extremely difficult matter for modern readers of the gospels to grasp, but Luke never meant for his story about Jesus’s birth at Bethlehem to be understood as historical fact. Luke would have...

Biographical history, as taught in our public schools, is still largely a history of boneheads: ridiculous kings and queens, paranoid political leaders, compulsive voyagers, ignorant generals — the flotsam and jetsam of historical currents. The...

They’re going to have to be very good witnesses ? or they’re history.

My first reaction, every time I delve into an episode of history that I don’t know very much about, is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.

History hasn’t been very kind to this organization in 10 years. So when you see a game decided on a ball that gets deflected in the end zone, with [Chargers free safety] Jerry Wilson catching...

The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.

We are now in the Me Decade – seeing the upward roll of the third great religious wave in American history.

A thousand years ago the Chinese had an entirely codified kitchen while the French were still gnawing on bones. Chopsticks have been around since the fourth century B.C. Forks didn’t show up in England until...

The period when Steve Jobs was not there was one of the most difficult periods in the company’s history. When he returned, he set Apple back on a positive trajectory again.

Those were two different teams last year. It’s a new season, a new team. Yeah, we have a history with these guys, (but) they can’t sit here and say, ‘Well, we did it last year,...

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion — ie., none to speak of

From the beginning, Europe assumed the power to make decisions within the international trading system. An excellent illustration of that is the fact that the so-called international law which governed the conduct of nations on...

As much as I want to be part of the history of this tournament and of this great game of golf, what I really try to do is prepare my best for each and every...

No matter what your history has been, your destiny is what you create today. What are you going to create?

We’re constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something...

Most of us would benefit greatly from recognizing and accepting the difference between our history and our destiny.

So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.

Time and times are but cogwheels, unmatched, grinding on oblivious to one another. Occasionally – oh, very rarely! – the cogs fit; the pieces of the plot snap together momentarily and give men faint glimpses...

Though we became experimental creatures of our own devising, it’s important to bear in mind that we had no inkling of this process, let alone its consequences, until only the last six or seven of...