Popular quotes about Historical! Wisdom and inspiration are here!
My first book was a historical novel. I started writing in 1974. In those days, historical novels meant ladies with swelling bosoms on the cover. Basically, it meant historical romance. It was not respectable as a genre.
Hilary MantelI'm not entirely sure what a historical novel absolutely has to be, but you don't want a reader who loves a very traditional historical novel to go in with the expectation that this is going to deliver the same kind of reading experience. I think what's contemporary about my book has something to do with how condensed things are.
Danielle DuttonOur knowledge of the historical worth of certain religious doctrines increases our respect for them, but does not invalidate our proposal that they should cease to be put forward as the reasons for the precepts of civilization. On the contrary! Those historical residues have helped us to view religious teachings, as it were, as neurotic relics, and we may now argue that the time has probably come, as it does in an analytic treatment, for replacing the effects of repression by the results of the rational operation of the intellect.
Sigmund FreudIt is important to insist on the historical truthfulness of the narrative of the fall of Adam and Eve. Just as the account of the creation of Adam and Eve is tied in with the rest of the historical narrative in the book of Genesis, so also this account of the fall of man, which follows the history of man's creation, is presented by the author as straightforward, narrative history
Wayne Grudem[Sacrifice of Isaac] is a major theme of the so-called Elohist [one authorial strand in the Pentateuch]. It is marked by all of his linguistic characteristics, and so on. We cannot determine what is historical and what isn't. As literary critics, we would understand the importance of this for understanding life, destiny. But the historical question must be left with a question mark.
Frank Moore Cross[T]he visibility of styles is itself a product of historical consciousness. ... The very notion of "style" needs to be approached historically. Awareness of style as a problematic and isolable element in a work of art has emerged in the audience for art only at certain historical moments - as a front behind which other issues, ultimately ethical and political, are being debated.
Susan Sontag[Albert] Camus always insisted that historical criteria and historical reasoning were not the only things to take into account, and that they weren't all powerful, that history could always be wrong about man. Today, this is how we are starting to think.
Catherine CamusAs much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.
Jonathan LethemPaul's lack of concern with the historical Jesus is not due, as some have argued, to his emphasis on Christological rather than historical concerns. It is due to the simple fact that Paul had no idea who the living Jesus was, nor did he care.
Reza AslanThe thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.
Tana FrenchIt is possible to express the laws of thermodynamics in the form of independent principles , deduced by induction from the facts of observation and experiment, without reference to any hypothesis as to the occult molecular operations with which the sensible phenomena may be conceived to be connected; and that course will be followed in the body of the present treatise. But, in giving a brief historical sketch of the progress of thermodynamics, the progress of the hypothesis of thermic molecular motions cannot be wholly separated from that of the purely inductive theory.
William John Macquorn RankineDarwin, Marx, and Freud meet. They may have understood other things, but the human soul, and in particular the soul of Culture-man, they did not understand. Systems like theirs are only historical curiosities to the 20th century, unless they happen to claim to be appropriate descriptions of Reality. Anyone who believes in these antiquated fantasies stamps himself as ludicrous, posthumous, ineffective, and superfluous. No leading men of the coming decades will be Darwinians, Marxians or Freudians.
Francis Parker YockeyI love the ideas of looking back to historical heroes to give us inspiration on how we can be today's heroes to move forward in the future. So guys like... William Bradford and William Wallace, the Bravehearts, the Patriots, the Pilgrims. There are so many of those people throughout history... whose stories have just never been told.
Kirk CameronIn no country has the historical blackout been more intense and effective than in Great Britain. Here it has been ingeniously christened The Iron Curtain of Discreet Silence. Virtually nothing has been written to reveal the truth about British responsibility for the Second World War and its disastrous results.
Harry Elmer BarnesI keep waiting for the day in which everyone who loves Downton Abbey will realize they were actually watching a historical romance novel.
Julia QuinnIn India there was a sense of time that does not tick with modern clocks, just as there is a knowledge that is not gained through science and empirical experiments. In the modern West knowledge is of objective, finite particulars in historical time. India recognizes that kind of useful information: it calls it "lower knowledge." Higher knowledge (paravidya) proceeds differently, or rather it doesn't proceed at all but enters history full-blown on the morning of a new creation.
Huston SmithI think the whole emphasis in England, in universities, on practical criticism (but not that so much as on historical criticism, knowing what period a line comes from) this is almost paralysing. In America, in University, we read - what? - T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Yeats, that is where we began. Shakespeare flaunted in the background. I'm not sure I agree with this, but I think that' for the young poet, the writing poet, it is not quite so frightening to go to university in America as it is in England, for these reasons.
Sylvia PlathAncient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.
Goldwin SmithI can UNDERSTAND pessimism, but I don't BELIEVE in it. It's not simply a matter of faith, but of historical EVIDENCE. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give HOPE, because for hope we don't need certainty, only POSSIBILITY.
Howard ZinnA novel is not, after all, a historical document, but a way to travel through the human heart.
Julia AlvarezThe recently ended twentieth century was characterized by a level of human rights violations unparalleled in all of human history. In his book Death by Government, Rudolph Rummel estimates some 170 million government-caused deaths in the twentieth century. The historical evidence appears to indicate that, rather than protecting life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness of their citizens, governments must be considered the greatest threat to human security.
Hans-Hermann HoppeWe should remember that the Declaration of Independence is not merely a historical document. It is an explicit recognition that our rights derive not from the King of England, not from the judiciary, not from government at all, but from God. The keystone of our system of popular sovereignty is the recognition, as the Declaration acknowledges, that 'all men are created equal' and 'endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.' Religion and God are no alien to our system of government, they're integral to it.
Mark LevinWe, the Greens, should thank our former foreign minister Joschka Fischer for bringing something hideous and shameful to light - that Nazi ideas were fully adopted by white-collar workers in the Foreign Ministry. Joschka Fischer stood up to criticism that he would foul his own nest, and with his order to start the historical commission he made it clear that the ministry's pride in itself, as a haven of resistance to Hitler, was no longer acceptable.
Claudia RothHistory has its truth, and so has legend. Legendary truth is of another nature than historical truth. Legendary truth is invention whose result is reality. Furthermore, history and legend have the same goal; to depict eternal man beneath momentary man.
Victor HugoI believe that the visit of the Queen to the United States is an admirable occasion to produce an historical, truthful, sincere, genuine analysis of how the British Monarchy evolved into its present situation.
Malcolm MuggeridgeIf we could view Muhammad as we do any other important historical figure we would surely consider him to be one of the greatest geniuses the world has known.
Karen ArmstrongWhen we were covering the 2008 campaign I told my young African American colleagues that despite the historical significance of victory, Barack Obama was going to break their hearts. They didn't want to hear that, and they refused to believe it. Eighteen months later they started dropping by one by one to say, sadly: "He broke our hearts." A couple of them even wept.
Bill MoyersI donโt want to disappoint too many people, but the number of interesting political, historical conversations we had, you could stick in your ear, it wasn't that many. We talked about friends, family and of course girls.
Ben BradleeI always tell students that the first question to ask about any historical action is this: who makes money out of the deal?
Carl R TruemanTo me the Mahabharata is a profoundly religious book, largely allegorical, in a way meant to be a historical record.
Mahatma GandhiAs a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.
Kate BravermanThere is evidence for the deity of Jesus -- good, strong, historical , cumulative evidence; evidence to which an honest person can subscribe without committing intellectual suicide.
John StottArt of course survives on the walls of private dwellings and corporate offices, but it 'dies' in the sense of losing its public, community-gathering, world-historical significance.
Julian YoungThere are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.
Vladimir Nabokovwe have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.
Angela DavisHypostatized into a ritual pattern, Marxian theory becomes ideology. But its content and function distinguish it from classical forms of ideology; it is not false consciousness, but a rather consciousness of falsehood, a falsehood which is corrected in the context of the higher truth represented by the objective historical interest.
Herbert MarcuseI work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.
Louise ErdrichHistorical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
Robert Penn WarrenHowever much an ideologue tries to bury [Lenin] beneath a proof by historical analysis, there is always this one man standing their on the plain of History and of our lives, in the eternal 'current situation.' He goes on talking, calmly or passionately. He goes on talking about something simple: his revolutionary practice, the practice of class struggle, about what makes it possible to act on history...not to demonstrate that revolutions are inevitable, but to make them in our unique present.
Louis AlthusserWhole great chunks of written history are of little value to the psychohistorian, while other vast areas which have been much neglected by historians - childhood history, content analysis of historical imagery, and so on - suddenly expand from the periphery to the center of the psychohistorian's conceptual world, simply because his or her own new questions require material nowhere to be found in history books.
Lloyd deMauseArgumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.
Peter KreeftHowever, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.
Ed MarkeyAs a journalist, I would talk to writers, directors, creative people, and discover that for an awful lot of them, the moment they became successful, that was all they were allowed to do. So you end up talking to the bestselling science-fiction author who wrote a historical-fiction novel that everybody loved, but no one would publish.
Neil Gaiman