Popular quotes about Historical! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 38
....the popular music of Jamaica, the music of the people, is an essentially experiential music, not merely in the sense that the people experience the music, but also in the sense that the music is true to the historical experience, that the music reflects the historical experience. It is the spiritual expression of the historical experience of the Afro-Jamaican.
Linton Kwesi JohnsonIt was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.
Hans-Georg GadamerAfricans and persons of African descent must assume the primary responsibility and leadership in historical research....if we are to continue to leave practically all important historical research and writing concerning the black race to the white man, then we must be prepared to accept, uncomplainingly, the white man's point of view.
Chancellor WilliamsI can honestly say that there are many forms of atheism that I find far more admirable than many forms of Christianity or of religion in general. But atheism that consists entirely in vacuous arguments afloat on oceans of historical ignorance, made turbulent by storms of strident self-righteousness, is as contemptible as any other form of dreary fundamentalism. And it is sometimes difficult, frankly, to be perfectly generous in oneโs response to the sort of invective currently fashionable among the devoutly undevout, or to the sort of historical misrepresentations it typically involves.
David Bentley HartThe facts which our senses present to us are socially performed in two ways: through the historical character of the object perceived and through the historical character of the perceiving organ. Both are not simply natural; they are shaped by human activity, and yet the individual perceives himself as receptive and passive in the act of perception.
Max HorkheimerLater, I went one step further, by putting in some invented "historical" bits [into the Lincoln in the Bardo]. And reading those alongside the actual historical bits was like looking into a sort of a painful mirror, because "my" parts were so show-offy at first. They stood out because they were so flamboyant.
George SaundersYou don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.
Tony KushnerBy the way, Howard Zinn's History of America is front and center at the gift shop of the New York Historical Society. The New York Historical Society is deluged with school kids on a daily basis.
Rush LimbaughWardruna is a combination of old and new. I use historical instruments and new and electronic instruments and tools. I use drones and samples to build these huge sounds. Sometimes just a sound can trigger words or melodies. I don't have a romantic notion about the past; with Wardruna I wanted to create something new using something old.
Einar SelvikNothing's new since Genesis. And so everybody in their life thinks history began when they were born. Most people's historical perspective happened when they were born in the sense that nothing has ever been this bad. "We've never gone before this before," and of course we have. Things have been worse in many ways in the country.
Rush LimbaughChristianity is a very historical religion - it makes specific claims that are open to testing.
Lee StrobelA people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.
Edith HamiltonYou 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.
Max RoachAncient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.
Goldwin SmithResearch can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.
Michael OndaatjeIf you're going to make sense of politics you have to have a historical perspective and also recognise that you have to work with people you don't agree with.
Tony BennWe, 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 RothI always say 300 is a sci-fi movie as much as anything. It's like that could be another planet. It doesn't have to be earth necessarily. That's like when people get so wrapped up in the politics of 300 I always go, "By the way, that's a sci-fi movie. It's not really a historical film."
Zack SnyderIt's good to get your hands dirty a bit and to test how you see things at a given point. And it's very pleasing after writing something like 'Atonement' or 'On Chesil Beach,' which are historical, to get involved in some plausible re-enactment of the here and now.
Ian Mcewan"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 SoberI have Tom Ford, Gucci, Saint Laurent, McQueen, and odd pieces that Ive just acquired because I happened to have come across them and felt they have some historical resonance.
Hamish BowlesStocks are a safe bet, but only if you stay invested long enough to ride out the . that squares with the facts, and with the historical record
Nick MurrayWhen you look back on a historical period of music, it seems so obvious to you what the characteristics of it are, but they're not obvious at the time. So, when I look back at my own work, I could easily write a very convincing sort of account of it that made it look like I had planned it all out from day one and that this led logically to that and then I did this and then that followed quite naturally from that. But that's not how it felt.
Brian EnoArt 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 technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are usually simple. A good example of a simple technology with profound historical consequences is hay. ... It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York.
Freeman DysonThe 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.
James FreyJesus as a concrete historical personality remains a stranger to our time, but His spirit, which lies hidden in His words, is known in simplicity, and its influence is direct.
Albert SchweitzerI think a lot of my interest in history now isn't so much in places and names and texts and public figures, but more in examining all the nuances and idiosyncrasies of particular stories of everyday people. And if that doesn't happen, then I usually transplant myself and my own stories to a particular historical event. Which is why you'll see me, the first person pronoun, interacting in a song about Carl Sandburg, or you'll find my [sic] interacting with Saul Bellow. It's sort of a re-rendering of history and making it my own.
Sufjan StevensHowever 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 AlthusserConsensual 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.
Sam KeenI do think that the Josianic return to the archaic form of the Passover is appropriate and, indeed, historical. Josiah does go back to a different, earlier tradition, the time of a central sanctuary in which the law code was read. But then there were accretions to the Book of Deuteronomy.
Frank Moore CrossA good legible label is usually worth, for information, a ton of significant attitude and expression in a historical picture.
Mark TwainHistorical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.
Laila LalamiYou can't play history and you can't play historical characters. You just have to reduce it to the ordinary.
Lorraine ToussaintOkay, NATO expanded to East Berlin and East Germany. Under [Bill] Clinton NATO expanded further, to the former Russian satellites. In 2008 NATO formally made an offer to Ukraine to join NATO. That's unbelievable. I mean, Ukraine is the geopolitical heartland of Russian concern, quite aside from historical connections, population and so on.
Noam ChomskyIn a public dialogue with Salman in London he [Edward Said] had once described the Palestinian plight as one where his people, expelled and dispossessed by Jewish victors, were in the unique historical position of being 'the victims of the victims': there was something quasi-Christian, I thought, in the apparent humility of that statement.
Christopher HitchensDuring all the first part of the Middle Ages, no other people made as important a contribution to human progress as did the Arabs, if we take this term to mean all those whose mother-tongue was Arabic, and not merely those living in the Arabian peninsula. For centuries, Arabic was the language of learning, culture and intellectual progress for the whole of the civilized world with the exception of the Far East. From the IXth to the XIIth century there were more philosophical, medical, historical, religiuos, astronomical and geographical works written in Arabic than in any other human tongue.
Philip Khuri HittiAll men and women are born, live, suffer and die; what distinguishes us one from another is our dreams, whether they be dreams about worldly or unworldly things, and what we do to make them come about... We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time and conditions of our death. But within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we live.
Joseph EpsteinSomewhat by historical happenstance the five permanent members of the UN Security Council - United States, Britain, France, Russia, and China - also were the original five countries to have nuclear weapons.
John BurroughsTelling about our lives is important for those who come after as, for those who will see our experience as part of their own historical struggle.
Linda HoganIf you muster that courage to stand under fire and not go down, you will amass an inner strength that no one can touch. You wonโt be another faceless, nameless, forgotten human in a long historical line of the defeated. You will be a steeled warrior, and a force to be forever reckoned with. And beneath the pain that lingers, you will have the comfort of knowing that you are strongest of all. That when others caved and broke, you kept fighting even against hopeless odds.โ - Caleb
Sherrilyn KenyonI don't think I have ever created an entire fiction piece or followed a historical piece and made that into a sermon.
Max LucadoWe'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 SchulzMost actors are drawn towards historical tellings because it's one of the most simple forms of storytelling.
Ben Barnes