Quotes About Historical

'Believing' cannot tip the scales in making a historical judgement about whether something really happened. I can choose to believe that George Washington threw a silver dollar across the Rappahannock, but my believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether or not he really did do it. So also with the story of Jesus walking on water: Believing that he did it has nothing to do with whether he really did do it. 'Belief' cannot be the basis for historical conclusions; it has no direct relevance.

Our 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.

All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.

The 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.

My obsessions stay the same - historical memory and historical erasure. I am particularly interested in the Americas and how a history that is rooted in colonialism, the language and iconography of empire, disenfranchisement, the enslavement of peoples, and the way that people were sectioned off because of blood.

Communism is Utopia, that is nowhere. It is the avatar of all our religious eschatologies: the coming of the Messiah, the second coming of Christ, nirvana. It is not a historical prospect, but a current mythology. Socialism, by contrast, is a realizable historical system which may one day be instituted in the world.

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

As much as I care about historical context - I'm very eager to read a really great historical account.

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

It is, let me say, at the very least by no means self-evident that there is more liberty, equality, and fraternity in the world today than there was one thousand years ago. One might arguably suggest that the opposite is true. I seek to paint no idyll of the worlds before historical capitalism. They were worlds of little liberty, little equality, and little fraternity. The only question is whether historical capitalism represented progress in these regards, or regression.

In the present, the way benevolence is expressed is in conceptualizing the Native as a historical relic; US people have to be constantly reminded that there are still existent Indigenous peoples and communities in North America, but whether left or right, recent immigrant or descendants of settlers, even descendants of enslaved Africans, the Native presence is not a consideration in the day to day life of individuals and municipal, state and national governments.

It 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.

Darwin, 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.

Everybody needs a fan, and the support and the encouragement. We're human beings; that is an essential part of the equation. When that fan is not there and when you're in a situation that triggers you on a historical level, you behave impulsively. You can destroy years worth of work professionally, personally, in a moment of being triggered by that.

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').

Nothing is more detestable to the physical anthropologist than... the wretched habit of cremating the dead. It involves not only a prodigal waste of costly fuel and excellent fertilizer, but also the complete destruction of physical historical data. On the other hand, the custom of embalming and mummification is most praiseworthy and highly to be recommended.

Some time ago a little-known Scottish philosopher wrote a book on what makes nations succeed and what makes them fail. The Wealth of Nations is still being read today. With the same perspicacity and with the same broad historical perspective, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have retackled this same question for our own times. Two centuries from now our great-great- . . . -great grandchildren will be, similarly, reading Why Nations Fail.

The 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.

I am not someone who believes I am going to find a historical scoop.

When 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.

I had a long writing history behind me before I got into anything in film. It comprehended science fiction, it comprehended historical, it comprehended, you know, just about everything that you can think of.

Except if it has some historical meaning for them to have Tibet under their control. I don't understand why [ Chinese] want it so much.

Historical research to this day remains unorganized, and the historian is expected to make his own instruments or do without them; and so with wooden ploughs we continue to draw lonely furrows, most successfully when we strike sand.

We British play an important role in Europe, even if we have a traditional and historical ambivalence towards the continent.

I don’t 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.

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

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.

The historical orthodox Christian faith is extremely wide and diverse.

The 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.

A historical romance is the only kind of book where chastity really counts.

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.

Whole 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.

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.

I enjoy thinking myself into other times and places. I don't like some of the conventions of the 'historical novel', but I think there's a way of doing it that has a lot of merit.

One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas - justice or progress or happiness of future generations... or emancipation of a nation or race or class... this is the belief that somewhere... there is a final solution.

I 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.

I think didactic art is boring. I mean, I love it in terms of, like, some of the historical precedents that I've learned from. You needed that. We needed those building blocks in terms of - you know, when I look at a great Barbara Kruger, for example, and you're thinking about, you know, the woman's position in society - you know, she found a way of making it beautiful, but at the same time it's very sort of preachy, you know what I mean?

I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one.

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

The Bible is not considered an accurate, absolute, authoritative, or authoritarian source but a book to be experienced and one experience can be as valid as any other can. Experience, dialogue, feelings, and conversations are equated with Scripture while certitude, authority, and doctrine are to be eschewed! No doctrines are to be absolute and truth or doctrine must be considered only with personal experiences, traditions, historical leaders, etc. The Bible is not an answer book.

I suspect people would be in for a real shock if they knew the depths of his [Obama's] historical ignorance.

Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces.

Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so.

The historical Woodrow Wilson suffered from numerous complaints which we might today label as psychosomatic. Yet, Wilson did have a stroke as a relatively young man of 39 and seemed always to be ill. He was 'high-strung' - intensely neurotic - yet a charismatic personality nonetheless.

On what does the Christian argument for Immortality really rest? It stands upon the pedestal on which the theologian rests the whole of historical Christianity-the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Juliet is one of those rare novels that has it all: lush prose, tightly intertwined parallel narratives, intrigue, and historical detail all set against a backdrop of looming danger. Anne Fortier casts a new light on one of history's greatest stories of passion. I was swept away.

The corniest movie ever made about the white man's need to lose his identity and assuage racial, political, sexual and historical guilt.

Every atom you possess has almost certainly passed through several stars and been part of millions of organisms on its way to becoming you. We are each so atomically numberous and so vigorously recycled at death that a significant number of our atoms-up to a billion for each of us, it has been suggested-probably once belonged to Shakespeare. A billion more each came from Buddha and Genghis Khan and Beethoven, and any other historical figure you care to name.