We're a terribly lonesome society. For all I know, all societies are. You can make a few new friends, that's all. You can't change history. History is happening to us now.
Part of why history is so important in my life is because it brings you an awareness that everything isn't new. It gives context to what's happening right now. History is cyclical but circumstances and technology change. So when social justice topics come up, they're not new. They're just being covered more. We have more ways to record it now.
I've seen things change and people forget: the history of Berlin, the history of queer struggle, the history of AIDS, the history of New York changing from an artistic powerhouse to more of a financial one now.
There was a time when history was written by a few people, the winners. Now, history is written by all of us all the time... That's the thing we keep telling our 14-year-olds, you know: anything you do right now, it's not going anywhere.
History is a record of perpetual wars, but we are now trying to make new history.
I've always tried to write California history as American history. The paradox is that New England history is by definition national history, Mid-Atlantic history is national history. We're still suffering from that.
A free and democratic society is not the norm. When you look to the history books, world history was not based on great democratic societies but on imperialism, absolute rule, kings, queens, monarchs, dictators.
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself; but each of us can work to change a small portion of events, and in the total; of all those acts will be written the history of this generation.
History is merciless. History doesn't care if we pound our society down a rat hole. It's up to us to make more intelligent choices about how we live!
There's a lot we should be able to learn from history. And yet history proves that we never do. In fact, the main lesson of history is that we never learn the lessons of history. This makes us look so stupid that few people care to read it. They'd rather not be reminded. Any good history book is mainly just a long list of mistakes, complete with names and dates. It's very embarrassing.
I'm an expert at killing time on planes now. I do a lot of reading. My secret sort of nerdy side is I'm quite into history so I read a lot of history books. Now I write for a few things and I've had a few history things published, which is cool. I indulge my nerdy side and it's kind of as far away as you can get from the acting world so that's nice as well.
I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. It means nothing to me. History is more or less bunk. It's tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker's damn is the history we make today.
In most of history, societies have not been free. It's a very rare society that is free. The default condition of human societies is tyranny.
What they teach you as history is mythology and true mythology is far from fantasy -- it is our true history. A bulk of our real history can be found in Egyptian and Greek mythology. Yes, myths reveal to us worlds of other dimensions that make up our true reality. History books teach us that the minds of the past operated on the same frequency, dimension, or level of consciousness as we do now. Not true at all.
The history of jazz lets us know that this period in our history is not the only period we've come through together. If we truly understood the history of our national arts, we'd know that we have mutual aspirations, a shared history, in good times and bad.
In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.
At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.