Top 1200 English History Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

To a man of liberal education, the study of history is not only useful, and important, but altogether indispensable, and with regard to the history contained in the Bible ...it is not so much praiseworthy to be acquainted with as it is shameful to be ignorant of it.

In the preface to his great History of Europe, H. A. L. Fisher wrote: "Men wiser than and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave ..." It seems to me that the same is true of the much older [geological stratigraphical] history of Europe.

Christ is the most unique person of history. No man can write a history of the human race without giving first and foremost place to the penniless Teacher of Nazareth.

Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written.

Nobody in history has won all the titles I've won and the cruiserweight title. I'd be the only man in history. That's when you die and go to Heaven, and God can look at you and know you did everything with the gifts he gave you.

The history of the church has been largely a history of "believers" refusing to believe in the way of the crucified Nazarene and instead giving in to the very temptations he resisted--power, relevancy, spectacle.

He was what I often think is a dangerous thing for a statesman to be - a student of history; and like most of those who study history, he learned from the mistakes of the past how to make new ones.

Governments should encourage and facilitate the teaching of history, but one does not want them to be able to dictate, for political or partisan reasons, what kind of history and interpretations are on offer to children.

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!

The huge, turgid work of history, sinking under the weight of its own 'politically correct' thesis and its foot- and source notes, is not the British way of writing history, and never has been.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

Throughout the human experience people have read history because they felt that it was a pleasure and that it was in some way instructive. The profession of professor of history has taken it in a very different direction.

The discussion of the game of marbles seems to have led us into rather deep waters. But in the eyes of children the history of the game of marbles has quite as much importance as the history of religion or of forms of government. It Is a history, moreover, that is magnificently spontaneous; and it was therefore perhaps not entirely useless to seek to throw light on the child's judgment of moral value by a preliminary study of the social behaviour of children amongst themselves.

I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason -that history is a protective armor against being misled.

Certainly there is not the fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment's comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed.

It's interesting to think about the history of Israel in relation to the history of the U.S.. There were Native Americans living here that U.S. settlers totally displaced, and that narrative is not connected with the Isreal-Palestinian struggle at all.

It is needless to say how great has been the influence of the doctrine of Evolution, or rather perhaps of the method of investigation to which it has given birth, upon the study of history, especially the history of institutions.

Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people.

Like their personal lives, women's history is fragmented, interrupted; a shadow history of human beings whose existence has been shaped by the efforts and the demands of others.

My heart goes out to victims and survivors of the Hurricane Katrina tragedy and to their families. This disaster will go down in history books as one of the largest natural disasters in U.S. history.

People who are trans don't owe you their entire history right out the gate, just like you wouldn't walk up to someone and tell them your medical history. You build trust.

The whole history of the last thousands of years has been a history of religious persecutions and wars, pogroms, jihads, crusades. I find it all very regrettable, to say the least.

I majored in history and political science at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, and I have always loved researching how a single human being can change the course of history.

We've yet to deal with the uncomfortable history of England being involved in the transatlantic slave trade, whereas America has at least made some movies dealing with its racial history.

Oral history is a research method. It is a way of conducting long, highly detailed interviews with people about their life experiences, often in multiple interview sessions. Oral history allows the person being interviewed to use their own language to talk about events in their life and the method is used by researchers in different fields like history, anthropology and sociology.

So history is fertile territory for me and I think I could feel happy with any period of history, provided I had the right sources and the necessary time for the initial research.

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are of the nature rather of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.

To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.

I try not to think about legacy because it is all ­folly. If you study history, even recent history, you'll find many people who were quite significant in their time but are completely forgotten.

I think we fool ourselves and really negate a great deal of history if we think that the oral history of poetry is shorter than the written history of poetry. It's not true. Poetry has a longer oral tradition than it does written

You get another person who operates only in an African language and there are many persons who operate only in African languages; he or she is excluded from all the goodies that come with English. And even in terms of justice, law codes, the legal system. A person who does not know English in Africa is excluded from that system because he can only operate through acts of translation.

Culture survives in smaller spaces - not in the history books that erect monuments to the nation's grand history but in cafes and cinema houses, village squares, and half-forgotten libraries.

The acting I got into by doing what we call pantomime, when I was sixteen. And, there were loads of very pretty girls in the show. I realized; I found out very early on, that the lead comic gets the girl. So, that was cool. When I went to university, I studied Economic Social History. And drama. That kind of got me into it. My main passion was to make films. It was never to be an actor. At that time, there weren't many opportunities for a working class Scottish actor. It was kind of an English thing. And it required a certain mannered cerebral acting style that I couldn't relate to.

The end of secrecy would be the end of the novel - especially the English novel. The English novel requires social secrecy, personal secrecy.

I love the novel of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful novel. I love the movie of 'The English Patient'; I think it's a profoundly beautiful movie. And they're totally different. You accept each on its own terms, and that's kind of the ideal.

If heads of states fail to seize the opportunity of our entry into the third millennium to provide for a better government of planet Earth, history will not forgive them - if there is a history.

Ceni was very skilful - and he made history. He played for 25 years at Sao Paulo, more than 1,200 games, and that's an inspiration. Hopefully, I can build a history like that.

I knew I wanted to go to college and I wanted to study it acting, so I just looked for the best school that I could get into. Luckily, I had very supportive parents. I went to a conservatory that is basically drama school. You take one English class and one history class for four years but you don't take any other science or anything like that. It's strictly, from 7am until night, all acting. It's a lot. Some people find it too much, but for me I was preparing for a career and I never really looked back.

I am convinced that much more emphasis should be placed on history. The purpose of history is to learn how human beings react when exposed to the danger of wounds or death.

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

Americans' lack of passion for history is well known. History may not quite be bunk, as Henry Ford suggested, but there's no denying that, as a people, we sustain a passionate concentration on the present and the future.

I did not know much history when I became a bombardier in the U.S. Air Force in World War II. Only after the War did I see that we, like the Nazis, had committed atrocities... Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Dresden, my own bombing missions. And when I studied history after the War, I learned from reading on my own, not from my university classes, about the history of U.S. expansion and imperialism.

The progress of science is much more muddled than is depicted in most history books. This is especially true of theoretical physics, partly because history is written by the victorious.

The interface of history and myth is where my stories take place anyway, and there's always a way I'm trying to tap mythologies with the perfect understanding that history will trump mythology.

As a child growing up in World War II, I was very moved and stirred by what was going on, but I distanced myself from history. I regarded history as just one more subject.

With support jobs moving to China and India, it's not surprising that English-speaking countries' top frustration revolves around the difficulty of understanding customer service representatives. However, even if the level of customer service is exceptional, the extent to which poorly-understood accents trump quality of service speaks to English-speaking customers' growing intolerance of non-native speech, more so than in other countries.

Anybody who comes to the cinema is bringing they're whole sexual history, their literary history, their movie literacy, their culture, their language, their religion, whatever they've got. I can't possibly manipulate all of that, nor do I want to.

History, when rightly written, is but a record of providence; and he who would read history rightly, must read it with his eyes constantly fixed on the hand of God. This statement of a nineteenth-century historian sums up the responsibility of the Christian teacher of history, for he who would teach history or any subject matter rightly, must teach it with his eyes constantly fixed on the hand of God.

If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.

But I don't know, maybe it's just as well I never got there. I dreamed about it for so many years. I used to go to English movies just to look at the streets. I remember years ago a guy I knew told me that people going to England find exactly what they go looking for. I said I'd go looking for the England of English Literature, and he nodded and said: "It's there.

The grand sweep of constitutional or political history is important, but a detailed history of daily life also gives you a wonderful insight into the strange mental worlds of people in the past.

I devour history books. I love anything by Thomas B. Costain or George MacDonald Fraser. He writes magnificent history, and he also wrote the Flashman stories, which are irresistible.

My book, Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research is about how researchers use this method and how to write up their oral history projects so that audiences can read them. It's important that researchers have many different tools available to study people's lives and the cultures we live in. I think oral history is a most needed and uniquely important strategy.

Why I talked about political correctness: the colonial is now such a major taboo that any achievement of the colonial period, or any generosity implied in colonialism, is again fundamentally neglected or fundamentally not recognised. That's crazy, because history is a series of layers, and you cannot say, "This layer I support and this layer I cancel." History is history and you cannot retrospectively manipulate it.

I don't think it is always necessary to take up the anti-colonial -- or is it post-colonial? -- cudgels against English. What seems to me to be happening is that those people who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it -- assisted by the English language's enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.

To write history is as important as to make history. It is an unchanging truth that if the writer does not remain true to the maker, then it takes on a quality that will confuse humanity.

The arrival of the Barbary pirates radically changed English attitudes. Instead of patriotic pirates plundering foreign cargoes and bringing them homes to enrich their countrymen, the 'Turks' were in the usual Mediterranean business of slave-raiding - and now the English were the victims. The West Country men suffered the heaviest, and did not appreciate the irony. The Newfoundland fishery, dominated by Devon ports, lost at least 20 ships in 1611 alone.

Canada could have enjoyed: English government, French culture, and American know-how. Instead it ended up with: English know-how, French government, and American culture.

The technical history of modern harmony is a history of growth of toleration by the human ear of chords that at first sounded discordant and senseless to the main body of contemporary professional musicians.