Historical famous quotes
04-24-2025
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I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
-- A. E. Housman -
I can think of films that I'm producing right now that are extremely hard-hitting, graphic films, that nobody necessarily wants to see, graphic in terms of violence, of adult content and racial and historical subject matter.
-- Aaron Eckhart -
Every time some new huckster of angst-ridden metaphor is appointed by Art Forum, the congregation genuflects, stroking the catalog like a handful of Rosary beads, and starts spreading that old gospel according to Hyperbole. No questions asked... And thus the bill of goods is sold, all along the line. An art historical snake, swallowing its own tale.
-- Abe Ajay -
By establishing reading societies, and subscription libraries, and taking these under our direction, and supplying them through our labors, we may turn the public mind which way we will.
-- Adam Weishaupt -
The greater the lie, the greater the chance that it will be believed.
-- Adolf Hitler -
I can not be mistaken - what I say and do is historical.I follow my life with the precision and security of a sleep walker
-- Adolf Hitler -
For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.
-- Adolf Hitler -
Swedes, we are not - Russians, we do not want to become ... so let us be Finnish.
-- Adolf Ivar Arwidsson -
A historical property has morals and ethics of the society that created it and it can be revived. What I mean is that we can discover new possibilities from the process of dismantling, transforming, and recreating.
-- Ai Weiwei -
There's room in the world for one historical folk-rock singer to make a decent living, and I happen to be it.
-- Al Stewart -
Disneyworld...is a historical reconstruction as sanitised as the Kremlin's, and a future vision as uncognisant of contemporary pointers as Peter Pan's. It is a magic carpet under which everything has been swept.
-- Alan Coren -
Purely historical thought is nihilistic; it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history.
-- Albert Camus -
Those who have the privilege to know have the duty to act.
-- Albert Einstein -
Your woodlot is, in fact, an historical document which faithfully records your personal philosophy.
-- Aldo Leopold -
A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.
-- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -
I was not aware of how much I loved 'Canoa' until I saw it after doing 'Y Tu Mama Tambien' and realized that my voice - over about the story's historical context - that narrator - came from 'Canoa'.
-- Alfonso Cuaron -
History has become more important than ever because of the to unprecedented ability of the historical sciences to take in man's life on earth as a whole.
-- Alfred Kazin -
Narcissism and the Confederate dead cannot be connected logically, or even historically; even were the connection an historical fact, they would not stand connected as art, for no one experiences raw history.
-- Allen Tate -
The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revoÂlution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.
-- Amadeo Bordiga -
Jung Chang was the first person to tell a grand historical, political story through a personal narrative.
-- Aminatta Forna -
The thing people forget when they are looking for solutions is there is nothing final in history.
-- Amira Hass -
Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges... which are employed altogether for their benefit.
-- Andrew Jackson -
You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the Eternal God I will rout you out. If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.
-- Andrew Jackson -
With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.
-- Andrew Roberts -
Is it not a rather fantastic historical irony that the torture techniques that the North Vietnamese used against McCain that forced him to offer a videotaped false confession... are now the techniques the Bush administration is using to gain "intelligence" about terror networks. How is it possible to know that everything John McCain once said on videotape for the enemy was false, because it was coerced, and yet assert that everything we torture out of terror suspects using exactly the same techniques, is true?
-- Andrew Sullivan -
Contemporary audiences, other than those making a deliberate historical leap, would find, say, the 1931 'Dracula' impossibly slow.
-- Andrew Tudor -
A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.
-- Andy Goldsworthy -
Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of ***** does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.
-- Angela Carter -
I think the importance of doing activist work is precisely because it allows you to give back and to consider yourself not as a single individual who may have achieved whatever but to be a part of an ongoing historical movement.
-- Angela Davis -
we have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.
-- Angela Davis -
NATO needs to adapt its strategy to meet new challenges
-- Angela Merkel -
I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.
-- Anita Diament -
It takes all sorts to make a world - saints as well as soldiers.
-- Anthony Anderson -
I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.
-- Antonia Fraser -
It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.
-- Antonia Fraser -
The starting-point of critical elaboration is the consciousness of what one really is, and is 'knowing thyself'as a product of the historical processes to date, which has deposited in you an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventory.
-- Antonio Gramsci -
The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always be identified within specific historical popular collectivities.
-- Antonio Gramsci -
The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.
-- Antony Beevor -
I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.
-- Antony Beevor -
Most of my career has been spent with the RSC doing Shakespeare, and the thing you learn from Shakespeare is that his historical plays don't bear anything other than a basic resemblance to history.
-- Antony Sher -
There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.
-- Archibald F. Bennett -
Republics decline into democracies and democracies degenerate into despotisms.
-- Aristotle -
History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.
-- Arnold J. Toynbee -
Any truth is better than indefinite doubt.
-- Arthur Conan Doyle -
The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.
-- Arthur Erickson -
The course of human history is determined, not by what happens in the skies, but what takes place in our hearts.
-- Arthur Keith -
But though such is our character (Oh. why should I speak of things unfit to be uttered?), the things said of us are an example of the proverb, 'The harlot reproves the chaste.' For those who have set up a market for fornication and established infamous resorts for the young for every kind of vile pleasure - who do not abstain even from males, males with males committing shocking abominations, outraging all the noblest and comeliest bodies in all sorts of ways, so dishonoring the fair workmanship of God.
-- Athenagoras of Athens -
For me, the original play becomes an historical document: This is where I was when I wrote it, and I have to move on now to something else.
-- August Wilson -
At the end of the day, I had to remain dedicated to historical accuracy.
-- Ava DuVernay -
We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.
-- Ayn Rand -
Actually, the only thing I regret is not making more underground films and bringing them with me as historical documents.
-- Bahman Ghobadi -
I strongly reject threats by any member state to destroy another or outrageous attempts to deny historical facts such as the Holocaust.
-- Ban Ki-moon -
I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.
-- Barack Obama -
A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.
-- Barbara Cartland -
It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around.... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
-- Barbara Tuchman -
It's very much to do with how I'm feeling ... I love to be experimental and use eclectic mismatched things and put them together to see what third entity is created! I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.
-- Bat for Lashes -
Fascism is a religion. The twentieth century will be known in history as the century of Fascism.
-- Benito Mussolini -
Assassination has never changed the history of the world.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
The world is weary of statesmen whom democracy has degraded into politicians.
-- Benjamin Disraeli -
History abhors determinism but cannot tolerate chance.
-- Bernard DeVoto -
To accept the story of the Arab destruction of the library of Alexandria, one must explain how it is that so dramatic an event was unmentioned and unnoticed not only in the rich historical literature of medieval Islam, but even in the literatures of the Coptic and other Christian churches, of the Byzantines, of the Jews, or anyone else who might have thought the destruction of a great library worthy of comment. That the story still survives, and is repeated, despite all these objections, is testimony to the enduring power of a myth.
-- Bernard Lewis -
We need a type of theatre which not only releases the feelings, insights and impulses possible within the particular historical field of human relations in which the action takes place, but employs and encourages those thoughts and feelings which help transform the field itself.
-- Bertolt Brecht -
All the important human advances that we know of since historical times began have been due to individuals of whom the majority faced virulent public opposition.
-- Bertrand Russell -
History is valuable, to begin with, because it is true; and this, though not the whole of its value, is the foundation and condition of all the rest. That all knowledge, as such, is in some degree good, would appear to be at least probable; and the knowledge of every historical fact possesses this element of goodness, even if it posses no other.
-- Bertrand Russell -
My likely historical significance is a terrible burden. ~ Calvin
-- Bill Watterson -
I've played so many historical characters because most horrible dictators are short, fat, middle-aged men.
-- Bob Hoskins -
A colossal event is upon us, the birth of a New World Order.
-- Brent Scowcroft -
I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.
-- Brian Eno -
In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.
-- Brian Ferneyhough -
When I was younger I saw God as a mighty healer who did something for me, but after all these years of valleys and painful trials Jesus has become an ever-present friend who is with me all the time. He has gone from being an historical God to being a living God to me today. I've fallen short many times during these trials and testings, but he has always been faithful. Whenever I've asked him to help me he always has....Jesus is everything and we are nothing.
-- Brother Yun -
Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.
-- Bruce Babbitt -
Coconut oil has been described as the “World's Healthiest Dietary Oilâ€. There is a mountain of historical evidence and medical research to verify this fact
-- Bruce Fife -
The works of the creative spirit last, they are essentially imperishable, while the world-stirring historical activities of even the most eminent men are circumscribed by time.
-- Bruno Walter -
Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.
-- C. L. R. James -
historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.
-- C. V. Wedgwood -
For we cannot adequately understand 'man' as an isolated biological creature, as a bundle of reflexes or a set of instincts, as an 'intelligible field' or a system in and of itself. Whatever else he may be, man is a social and an historical actor who must be understood, if at all, in close and intricate interplay with social and historical structures
-- C. Wright Mills -
There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.
-- Camille Paglia -
Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.
-- Carl Clinton Van Doren -
Fortifications, artillery, foreign aid - will be of no value, unless the ordinary soldier knows that it is HE guarding his country
-- Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim -
Officers don't run, only corporals do that
-- Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim -
Instinct is like Nature herself - prodigiously conservative, and yet transcending her own historical conditions in her acts of creation.
-- Carl Jung -
Naturally, every age thinks that all ages before it were prejudiced, and today we think this more than ever and are just as wrong as all previous ages that thought so. How often have we not seen the truth condemned! It is sad but unfortunately true that man learns nothing from history.
-- Carl Jung -
All historical writing, even the most honest, is unconsciously subjective, since every age is bound, in spite of itself, to make the dead perform whatever tricks it finds necessary for its own peace of mind.
-- Carl L. Becker -
It is best to erase all personal history because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people
-- Carlos Castaneda -
Actually my first eight books were historical novels, but they were never published
-- Caroline B. Cooney -
After I had written seventeen full-length mysteries, two volumes of mini-mysteries, a travel guide and some quiz books, not to mention a spin-off Roman Mystery Scrolls series, I thought it was time I moved to new historical pastures.
-- Caroline Lawrence -
Now, what does a vampire do with a computer? Keep track of investments? Send e-mail to other vampires as you all plot to take over the world?†“I spend a lot of time on Wikipedia making corrections to the entries of historical figures I’ve known.†I blinked at him. “Really?†“No, Kitty. That was a joke.
-- Carrie Vaughn -
The Council on Foreign Relations is the American branch of a society which originated in England ... [and] ... believes national boundaries should be obliterated and one-world rule established.
-- Carroll Quigley -
Islam, the third in historical sequence of the ethical monotheistic religions of the Near East, was very successful in establishing its monotheism, but had only very moderate success in spreading its version of Jewish and Christian ethics to the Arabs.
-- Carroll Quigley -
It is clear that every civilization undergoes a process of historical change. We can see that a civilization comes into existence, passes through a long experience, and eventually goes out of existence.
-- Carroll Quigley -
Western civilization presents one of the most difficult tasks for historical analysis, because it is not yet finished, because we are a part of it and lack perspective, and because it presents considerable variation from our pattern of historical change.
-- Carroll Quigley -
I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field.
-- Carroll Quigley -
The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That Board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is Private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people's money.
-- Charles August Lindbergh -
Those not favorable to the money trust could be squeezed out of business and the people frightened into demanding changes in the banking and currency laws which the Money Trust would frame.
-- Charles August Lindbergh -
The Bible's historical accuracy is a reminder that while "the heavens declare the glory of God," there's also plenty of evidence among the rubble and ruins.
-- Charles Colson -
That the apostolic office is temporary, is a plain historical fact.
-- Charles Hodge
