Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you’ll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook,...

An old adage warns: If you don’t know your history, you will be forever condemned to repeat it. Likewise, if you don’t know your science fiction, and heed its warnings, you could condemn the Earth...

Many before have hailed the end of history; none have ever been right.

All civilizations we know about have left a record of their history in material things. We know them through tablets or ruins dug up by archaeologists. But we know of the Jews in ancient times...

Here the past was everywhere, an entire continent sown with memories.

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn’t absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity;...

As far back as history records people thinking, thinking peoplehave been befuddled by the mysteries of life and existence.

History is contemporary. Your understanding of history confirms what you think of the present. It’s not neutral. I would be very surprised if people with a different view of the present, don’t take issue with...

Revolutions are the locomotives of history.

History is the present. That’s why every generation writes it anew. But what most people think of as history is its end product, myth.

As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long known in popular slang as Bedlam. The principal public asylum in London, it had accepted dangerous and insane paupers...

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.

By the Middles Ages it was a sin to have sex with a child. If an adult were guilty of such a sin, one remedy was to declare the child a witch. The child thus...

In the Christian tradition, there is a very decisive problem in distinguishing between the senses of the terms “Jesus” and “Christ.” “Jesus” refers to a historical character; “Christ” refers to an eternal principle, the Son...

No man is a caricature, no individual can alone bear responibilty for a nation’s collapse. The disaster Zaire became, the dull acquiescence of its people, had its roots in a history of extraordinary outside interference,...

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at...

We naturally try to forget our personal tragedies, serious or trifling, as soon as possible (even something as petty as being scorned or disdained by a stranger on a street corner). We try not to...

When history looks back, it’ll see the cruise industry as the rebirth of this port.

This is one of those times when history looks upon us to see where we are,

Stand still while I yell at you.

(regarding Charles Lee) This eccentric and notably slovenly man was always trailed by his beloved dogs. “When I can be convinced that men are as worthy objects as dogs”, he once explained, “I shall transfer...

It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not...

It has been argued that close attention to the history of science is indispensable for doing good philosophy of science.

Both history and practices of ‘the myth of empires’ have demonstrated that the pre-emptive strategy will bring the Bush administration an outcome that it is most unwilling to see, that is, absolute insecurity of the...

The only philosophy that can be practiced responsibly in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but...

We, as we read, must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

I began with the desire to speak with the dead.

Of one thing I am certain: No single people, tradition, religion, governmental form, ethical program, moral code, or civilization has had sufficient wisdom and goodness to set the pattern and govern he world in the...

Never question the power of one! Throughout history it has been the actions of only one person who has in inspired the movement of change.

The past, which as always did not know the future, acted in ways that ask tobe imagined before they are condemned. Or even simplified.

Any big hotels have got scandals,” he said. “Just like every big hotel has got a ghost. Why? Hell, people come and go. Sometimes one of em will pop off in his room, heart attack...

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 is always a fashion to advise disputants to sit round a table and solve disputes by dialogue and discussion, and not to resort to violent confrontation and wars. Whether in national disputes or in...

The ‘healthy’ sign, for Barthes, is one which draws attention to its own arbitrariness—which does not try to palm itself off as ‘natural’ but which, in the very moment of conveying a meaning, communicates something...

When he told me that he would fight forever, I knew that he would have to be defeated.

God is the one who always remembers those whom history has forgotten.

We wanted people to gain an understanding of why history is important. Those nine minutes put it in context in a powerful, visual way.

I’ve always had a keen sense of history. My father was an antiques dealer and he used to bring home boxes full of treasures, and each item always had a tale attached.

The only enemy which stands between the talent you posses and success you achieve is known as “EGO” in our Society

A too often forgotten truth is that you can live through actual events of history and completely miss the underlying reality of what’s going. What history misses, the myth clearly expresses. The myth in the...

Life doesn’t walk away, we do.

Think of any great man or woman. How can you separate them from the years in which they lived? You can’t. Their greatness lies in their response to that moment.

I think it’s going to go down as an important point in our history. And I know they’re (BEGIN BRACKET) Toyota (END BRACKET) looking at it from a long-term view.

Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding ‘like Princess Di’) but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine...

Without realizing that the past is constantly determining their present actions, they avoid learning anything about their history. They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that is no longer exists,...

Things just happen, one after another. They don’t care who knows. But history… ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it’s not history. It’s just… well, things happening one after another.

History is made by people. And the majority of people are arseholes. Which is I suppose why the majority of history has been so disastrous.

Believing, as they now did, that the heavenly powers took part in human affairs, they became so much absorbed in the cultivation of religion and so deeply imbued with the sense of their religious duties,...

All of the great mastermind thinkers throughout history have known that we become our thoughts.

I just don’t see why the past has to matter.