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...

The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.

Poor little girl. Poor little girl,” Nan says, and at first I think she is speaking of the baby, perhaps it is a girl after all. But then I realize she is speaking of me,...

Kebanyakan buku tentang penderitaan keluarga orang yang dianggap terlibat G-30-S tahun 1965 ditulis dengan kemarahan. Buku “Berpijak di Dunia Retak: Catatan Keluarga Penyintas Tragedi 1965” ini malah mengalir dengan nuansa ketabahan dan keuletan menempuh ujian...

I am a storyteller, not a historian, and it’s my ambition to create something compelling – something unputdownable and riveting – that chimes with the real history but is, in fact, fiction.

When we can’t see ourselves in our history, we begin to think that we are disconnected and suffering alone. Historical ignorance always precedes cultural imbalances and individual despair.

Bigotry is the disease of ignorance, of morbid minds; enthusiasm of the free and buoyant. Education and free discussion are the antidotes of both. We are destined to be a barrier against the returns of...

Living your life is a task so difficult it has never been attempted before.

Sometimes – history needs a push.

Black seamen – or “Black Jacks” as African sailors were known – enjoyed a refreshing world of liberty and equality. Even if they were generally regulated to jobs such as cooks, servants, and muscians and...

Just a month after the completion of the Declaration of Independence, at a time when he delegates might have been expected to occupy themselves with more pressing concerns -like how they were going to win...

That Detroit ultimately concentrated on automobiles could be traced to one genius, Henry Ford…. But that the necessary human energy for this development existed in Detroit could be proven through its early history…. I told...

…history is a selection process – it chooses moments and events, and even people – it hands them a situation that they shouldn’t be able to overcome, and it’s in those moments, in that fight,...

Whatever path we take, the first step is to acknowledge the complexity of the dilemma and to accept that simplistically dividing the past into good guys and bad guys leads nowhere. Unless, of course, we...

[In 16th century European society] Marriage was the triumphal arch through which women, almost without exception, had to pass in order to reach the public eye. And after marriage followed, in theory, the total self-abnegation...

You shall not hear their mirth:You shall not come to think them well contentBy any jest of mine. These men are worthYour tears:You are not worth their merriment.

He(Prophet Muhammad) was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue;...

I was alive when the Dead Sea was just a lake that was feeling a little poorly.

Anthony imagined a time before all that – a time when people sipped Earl Grey tea on a breeze cooled veranda and looked out upon endless countryside.

The history of your world is filled with the voice of the victor, the voice of power, although it was not always a voice of sanity, by any means.

I go into my library and all history unrolls before me.

In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the world, ultimately...