Quotes About Historical

Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.

Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I'll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp -- as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention, it loses its historical reality.

[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.

If the evidence supports the historical accuracy of the gospels, where is the need for faith? And if the historical reliability of the gospels is so obvious, why have so many scholars failed to appreciate the incontestable nature of the evidence?

Even if people tell me they have historical proof [that it is not historical], that doesn't really bother me.

Paul'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.

With 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.

I think the issue that millennials have is that the return on asset classes such as bonds, cash, are so low now compared to the historical levels that it's very difficult for them to save enough to be able to retire comfortably. If interest rates do trend back upwards, it may be less of a problem going forward.

Tradition, in its essence, is something simultaneously meta-historical and dynamic: it is an overall ordering force in the service of principles that have the chrism of a superior legitimacy (we may even call them 'principles from above').

The idea was to take fine art and put it into the location of the movie scripts. The script itself is collage - some of the lines come from actual movies and I've written others to make the text work with the found image. In this way, the details of old dead guys' paintings (from the collection of the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, where this work will be exhibited in relation to the historical paintings) become illustrations of the movie scripts. I found this mélange of high art and Hollywood amusing.

There is no useful information contained in historical price movements of securities.

The claim of the Zen followers that they are transmitting the essence of Buddhism is based on their belief that Zen takes hold of the enlivening spirit of the Buddha, stripped of all its historical and doctrinal garments.

In 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.

You can't write the same book twice. Though I've been in historical musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.

I 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.

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

I regard this conclusion as coming in the same sort of category, of historical probability so high as to be virtually certain, as the death of Augustus in AD 14 or the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70

To have united the purposes of an entire Nation, is the great historical achievement of the man in whose strong hands our President has placed the fate of our people.

Most romances aren't swept aside by big historical events. Most romances in the history of the world fall apart because of other, smaller happenings. History can sometimes be in the background, the thing which instead of rupturing your life merely irritates you by pressing itself now and then into the foreground.

One way to explain the complexity and unpredictability of historical systems, despite their ultimate determinacy, is to note that long chains of causation may separate final effects from ultimate causes lying outside the domain of that field of science.

I'm less influenced by any of [Karl] Marx's ideas today than I've ever been in my life, and most significantly Marx's theory of historical materialism, which I think is virtually a debris of despotism.

Size 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.

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'.

Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.

The Bible did not arrive by fax from heaven. The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.

According to Marx, socialism is the first stage of communism and it covers a very long historical period in which we must practise the principle "to each according to his work" and combine the interests of the state, the collective and the individual, for only thus can we arouse people's enthusiasm for labour and develop socialist production.

To me, there's a huge difference between criticism and reviewing. I really love reading good criticism of television and film. To me, a critic is someone who analyzes a show, describes it, talks about the people in it, puts it in historical context of other shows like it, compares it and stuff, and then talks about the intent of the show and whether it failed or didn't.

In 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.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

The 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.

I'm a huge historical fiction and non-fiction fan.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

The tea party saved the Republican Party. In a broad sense, the tea party rescued it from being the fat, unhappy, querulous creature it had become, a party that didn't remember anymore why it existed, or what its historical purpose was. The tea party, with its energy and earnestness, restored the GOP to itself.

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships? ... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

I think Stephen Crane too becomes trapped in a myth that poetry should be operating at a certain level, that there's the real world and the reflection of that real world. I don't exist in any of these historical periods. I exist in the period in which I'm writing the book. So I only attempt to frame this in a way that I myself relate to.

I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.

Consensual paranoia - the pathology of the normal person who is a member of a war-justifying society - forms the template from which all the images of the enemy are created. By studying the logic of paranoia, we can see why certain archetypes of the enemy must necessarily recur, no matter what the historical circumstances.

I sometimes wish taste wasn't ever an issue, and the sounds of instruments or synths could be judged solely on their colour and timbre. Judged by what it did to your ears, rather than what its historical use reminds you of.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

The Heretic Queen is historical fiction at its best. Michelle Moran seamlessly incorporates accurate details into a story full of suspense, intrigue, and tenderness that's impossible to put down until you've reached the last page. An absolute triumph!

Not 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.

I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event.

Fashion museums think the more you know about the significance of clothes culturally, the more interesting they are. We certainly don't neglect the aesthetic aspects of clothes. But, I feel that what sets us apart from social, economic, and even aesthetic, or art historical context is that we are not only talking about clothes as kind of art objects created by an artist designer, but also we're talking about the various meanings that clothes have in the world, and how that changes and how we kind of create meanings around clothes.

The idea of a method that contains firm, unchanging, and absolutely binding principles for conducting the business of science meets considerable difficulty when confronted with the results of historical research. We find, then, that there is not a single rule, however plausible, and however firmly grounded in epistemology, that is not violated at some time or another.

When I was younger, I used to be very impatient with anyone who wasn't doing overtly political work. I've since come to feel that some writers have an appetite or a need for the political, for political discourse, for historical political subjects.