Popular quotes about Historical! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 31
It is clear, from these considerations, that the three methods of classifying mankind-that according to physical characters, according to language, and according to culture-all reflect the historical development of races from different standpoints; and that the results of the three classifications are not comparable, because the historical facts do not affect the three classes of phenomena equally. A consideration of all these classes of facts is needed when we endeavour to reconstruct the early history of the races of mankind.
Franz BoasThe functional language is a radically anti-historical language: operational rationality has little room and little use for historical reason.
Herbert MarcuseThe annual award of $5,000 goes to an author for a meritorious book published in the previous year for children or young adults. Scott O'Dell established this award to encourage other writers--particularly new authors--to focus on historical fiction. He hoped in this way to increase the interest of young readers in the historical background that has helped to shape their country and their world.
Scott O'DellWith a historical novel you know that liberties are being taken. Since Walter Scott, we know that poetic license, dramatic license, that events been conflated and that liberties have been taken, characters ditto, dates rearranged. But people don't seem to understand that movies are fictions, they are dramatizations, at least historical movies, and we should accord the moviemakers some of the same understanding and latitude. When you go to a movie you know it's a dramatization and not history.
Nicholas MeyerI can relate to historical characters or imaginary ones. It doesn't matter if a story takes place in the future or in the present, as long as the story is compelling.
Eric StoltzIt's a historical fact that the Stasi did horrible things and that they monitored a lot of people in East Germany, but I find it very interesting to think about the importance of the Western secret services back then and still working today.
Christian SchwochowHistorical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.
Samantha PowerI prefer to have all of this apparatus - historical, literary, critical - and then, beyond initial innocence and naivetรฉ, to try to achieve a new innocence, a new naivetรฉ.
Frank Moore CrossIf the 'Principle of Relativity' in an extreme sense establishes itself, it seems as if even Time would become discontinuous and be supplied in atoms, as money is doled out in pence or centimes instead of continuously;-in which case our customary existence will turn out to be no more really continuous than the events on a kinematograph screen;-while that great agent of continuity, the Ether of Space, will be relegated to the museum of historical curiosities.
Oliver LodgeNothing genuinely historical was ever lost in this country. For this reason we have two ruling parties: villains and fools.
Franz GrillparzerIt seemed to me, in some way, especially when you're looking back at distant historical events, the "Truth" with a capital "T" is kind of the juxtaposition of all the many, many, many truths that seem true to people at the time.
George SaundersI'm pleased to say that it [ a paper on the history of Attica] got much recognition with a 99 grade. It was shown to the Attica Historical Society, who enthusiastically responded to it and read it at one of their annual meetings resulting in an article in the local newspaper about this excellent paper being presented. As I now look back at it, I think of that as being really my first book and did indicate that I did have interest in research.
Paul SmithOne of the things I enjoy most about writing historical romance is researching inspiring backgrounds and settings.
Nicola CornickThe historical weight of gender inequality has tended to concentrate women in lower-paid jobs with fewer benefits and at the same time made them primarily responsible for care giving.
Stephanie CoontzIt was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition.
Elie WieselWith respect to public acknowledgment of religious belief, it is entirely clear from our nation's historical practices that the Establishment Clause permits this disregard of polytheists and believers in unconcerned deities, just as it permits the disregard of devout atheists.
Antonin ScaliaThe things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.
Carlos Castaneda"Tiger is a natural kind" and "Tiger is a historical particular" are incompatible with each other, and evolutionary biology provides a reason for favoring the latter over the former.
Elliott SoberSize will hurt returns. Look at Berkshire Hathaway - the last five things Warren has done have generated returns that are splendid by historical standards, but now give him $100 billion in assets and measure outcomes across all of it, it doesn't look so good. We can only buy big positions, and the only time we can get big positions is during a horrible period of decline or stasis. That really doesn't happen very often.
Charlie MungerAfter closely examining my conscience, I venture to state that in my historical novels I intended the content to be just as modern and up-to-date as in the contemporary ones.
Lion FeuchtwangerIn historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.
Leo TolstoyThe line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.
Neil PostmanArt 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 YoungThe ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule.... It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society.
Mao ZedongBiblical archaeology was developed early in this century in an effort to substantiate the authenticity of the Biblical account. It's by now generally recognized in Biblical scholarship that it has done the opposite. The Bible is not a historical text, and has only vague resemblances to what took place, as far as can be reconstructed. For example, whether Israel ever existed is not clear; if so, it was probably a small kingdom somewhere in the hills, apparently virtually unknown to the Egyptians.
Noam ChomskyI 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 ErdrichMaya Jasanoff's Liberty's Exiles places the loyalist experience and the aftermath of the American Revolution in an entirely new light. Alongside the Spirit of 1776, Jasanoff gives us the Spirit of 1783, dedicated to remaking the mighty British Empire, and then offers a stunning reinterpretation of the Loyalists' complicated role in that remaking. Her meticulously researched and superbly written account is historical revision at its finest, and it affirms her place as one of the very finest historians of the rising generation.
Sean WilentzWhen I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.
Trevor NunnIf there be a mind that, not perceiving in the narratives we have compared the fingermarks of tradition, and hence the legendary character of these evangelical anecdotes, still leans to the historical interpretation, whether natural or supernatural; that mind must be alike ignorant of the true character both of legend and of history, of the natural and the supernatural.
David Friedrich StraussI've managed to include only enough historical detail to give the "flavor" of the time period while keeping the characters and story focal.
Julie KlassenI sometimes joke that I am the first writer of historical fiction who can look out his window and point to the objects in his novels. I have a view of the entrance to the Bosporus, the old city, Hagia Sophia, the Blue Mosque.
Orhan PamukMy friend Ronald Gottesman says...that the cause of all our trouble is the belief in an essential, pure identity: religious, ethnic, historical, ideological.
Chris AbaniAmong the virtues and vices that make up the British character, we have one vice, at least, that Americans ought to view with sympathy. For they appear to be the only people who share it with us. I mean our worship of the antique. I do not refer to beauty or even historical association. I refer to age, to a quantity of years.
William GoldingI think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.
Sarah DessenIt is precisely because education is the road to equality and citizenship, that it has been made more elusive for Negroes than many other rights. The walling off of Negroes from equal education is part of the historical design to submerge him in second class status. Therefore, as Negroes have struggled to be free they have had to fight for the opportunity for a decent education.
Martin Luther King, Jr.Bertrand Russell said, 'Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.' And it's not 'they' who say, but Walter Benjamin who said, 'Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.' In September, 1940, Benjamin died under ambiguous circumstances in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, while attempting to flee the Nazis.
Mary Jo BangNot infrequently, Southern food now unlocks the rusty gates of race and class, age and sex. On such occasions, a place at the table is like a ringside seat at the historical and ongoing drama of life in the region.
John EgertonWe're at a historical juncture: A growing number of people are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with.
Martin SchulzThe scale of marital breakdowns in the West since 1960 has no historical precedent that I know of, and seems unique, . . . There has been nothing like it for the last 2,000 years, and probably longer.
Lawrence StoneCritics often point to historical issues such as slavery, upon which many Christians did act inconsistently, in an effort to invalidate Christian participation in contemporary social issues.
H. Wayne HouseWith 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 RobertsLike, I took no poetic license with 'Schindler's List' because that was historical, factual documents.
Steven SpielbergNow, I actually have to a degree, a responsibility to ensure that it doesn't happen again.' I felt pride. When you're up there [in the noose] it does give you pause but I'm no stranger to degradation and dehumanization. I felt a lot of pride to be a part of showing something like this because a lot of people don't know and haven't been exposed to these types of historical experiences until they see it depicted on our show [Underground].
Aldis Hodge