Top 1200 Literature History Quotes & Sayings - Page 20

I am a nationalist, and a Pan-Africanist, first and foremost. I was well grounded in history before ever taking a history course. I did not spend much formal time in school - I had to work.

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

History is one of the only fields where contributions by amateurs are taken seriously, providing you follow the rules and document your sources. In history, it's what you write, not what your credentials are.

The history of thought, and therefore all history, is the re-enactment of past thought in the historian's own mind.

In the past, history was always written by the victors. But in the age of Twitter, history is written by everyone.

To treat the history of Israel as I would treat the history of England or Russia or China; that is, an attempt at a scientific, historical approach.I am particularly fascinated with origins.

Except for the people who were there that one day they discovered the polio vaccine, being part of history is rarely a good idea. History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

As artists, our primary function is not to be educators - but we are at a time in history, where for us, our history needs to give context for stories that we hope to tell down the road.

It is untrue that fiction is nonutilitarian. The uses of fiction are synonymous with the uses of literature. They include refreshment, clarification of life, self-awareness, expansion of our range of experiences, and enlargement of our sense of understanding and discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty , and understanding. Like literature generally, fiction is a form of discovery, perception, intensification, expression, beauty, and understanding. If it is all these things, the question of whether it is a legitimate use of time should not even arise.

'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.

From the time I was a little boy I found myself reading history when I had a choice. I read a lot of things, but history had a special appeal for me.

History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity.It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.

That's why history is not an answer to our problem, because history complicates, enlarges every problem of human existence. Now, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries didn't believe this.

You always need a textural landscape. I think that's what fashion is about, and I think when you come to a brand and you're trying to re-instill its history, the history only comes through being personal.

History is not life, but since only life makes history, the union of the two is obvious.

I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It's a continual path that shows we don't always know something, but we're always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.

Think about it: you've already related it down to something that somebody else can understand. If art relates to something - it's like Picasso, it's like Mondrian - it's not. Art's supposed to be what it is. Using a reference of art history might help for some kind of sales, but it doesn't really help anybody. Art is what it is; it cannot be footnoted, until it enters the world. Then it has a history. Then the footnotes are the history, not the explanation.

Adam Clayton Powell's entire political career has to be looked at in the entire context of the American history and the history of, and the position of the Afro- American or negro in American history. [He] has done a remarkable job in fighting for rights of black people in this country. On the other hand, he probably hasn't done as much as he could or as much as he should because he is the most independent negro politician in this country.

History within itself cannot be transcended. ... In history itself there are only relative victories.

A western audience might not appreciate 'Chanakya's Chant' because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.

I often like to think that our map of the world is wrong, that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature as the central metaphor that we want to work out from. Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death. A book is life with one dimension pulled out of it. And life is something that lacks a dimension which death will give it. I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination in the sense that for characters in a book, what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

Who do you suppose invented computers? Speaking in terms relevant to you, in terms of earth history, let alone other worldly history, the computer, of course, came from Atlantis.

History says, Don’t hope On this side of the grave, But then, once in a lifetime The longed-for tidal wave Of justice can rise up, And hope and history rhyme

What's interesting to me, is a moving someone through time; in a way, history is part of my landscape. And it fascinates me that history can be so easily reflected in what happens today.

All over the planet, nature is being transformed into 'un-nature' at breakneck speed...My life is part of natural history. I long to know where that history came from and where it is going.

It's very important that all the supporting characters feel like they've existed in the world, that they've had a history, and they'll go on to have a history within the scope of the story rather than just popping up and then disappearing.

The Cross of Christ is the crux of history. Without the Cross, history cannot be defined or corrected.

I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.

History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes.

The history of mankind is the history of our misunderstandings with god, for he doesn't understand us, and we don't understand him.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that men never learn anything from history.

I would be wonderful with a 100-year moratorium on literature talk, if you shut down all literature departments, close the book reviews, ban the critics. The readers should be alone with the books, and if anyone dared to say anything about them, they would be shot or imprisoned right on the spot. Yes, shot. A 100-year moratorium on insufferable literary talk. You should let people fight with the books on their own and rediscover what they are and what they are not. Anything other than this talk.

Those who invoke history will certainly be heard by history. And they will have to accept its verdict.

The history of human opinion is scarcely anything more than the history of human errors.

When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.

As someone who has long loved history and reads a lot of history, especially when you get a distance like 130 years, these people can seem almost mythical, and you need something tangible to make them real.

I'm a strong believer that you can build great companies in time of both greed and fear. But you have to be paying attention and operating under the right assumptions. You don't have to believe history repeats itself, but you should accept that history rhymes.

Throughout Pixar's history, we've had major meltdowns and crises. It's happened throughout our history: you reach a certain point, it doesn't work, and you start all over again.

History is important. More than any other topic, it is about us. Whether one deems our present society wondrous or awful or both, history reveals how we got to this point.

Imagination, whatever may be said to the contrary, will always hold a place in history, as truth does in romance. Has not romance been penned with history in view?

For many people during many centuries, mankind's history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, [the Torah] the sacred writings of the Jewish people ... They were the first to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No other people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources.

It is unfortunate that so much of the history of Africa has been written by conquerors, foreigners, missionaries and adventurers. The Egyptians left the best record of their history written by local writers.

You can’t kill history. You can’t shoot it with a bullet and watch it recede into whatever lies outside of memory. History is tougher than that—if it’s going to die, it has to die on its own

Jerry Garcia was a great American master and the Grateful Dead are not just a genuine piece of musical history, but also an important part of American history.

To me, the difference between mythology and real history is that the real history has to tell a kind of believable story of how things happened. The physics has to work.

Today, I don't believe in destiny. But I do believe in history...There's nothing more powerful than history.

I'm a historian by training and by conviction. And so the thing that has throughout informed my thinking about international relations is history. I think, for example, the reason that I was perhaps able to see sooner than some others that the Soviet Empire in Eastern Europe was decaying--if not disintegrating--was that I came to it through history and through Germany, rather than through Sovietology and through Moscow. And therefore the starting point was that no empire in history has lasted forever, and this one won't either.

Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

The history of human use of plants, mushrooms, and animals for their psychedelic effects is far older than written history, and probably predates the appearance of the modern human species.

Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic.

Our old history ends with the Cross; our new history begins with the resurrection.

The tragedy of film history is that it is fabricated, falsified, by the very people who make film history.

History will only ever be partial, to a large extent history tells us what we think should be remembered and what should be forgotten, I find that really problematic.

You know Manchester is always a bit of a hard place for people coming from London, just with all the history. Manchester has this immensely huge and healthy history musically.

People are used to seeing natural history programmes that have been filmed over many years which are concentrated, focused visions of natural history.

People tend to pay too little attention to history - the history of Silicon Valley and American business - and think they're the first people to come across a problem.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

For 'Portillo's Hidden History of Britain,' I arranged to meet men and women who were witnesses to history - ordinary people who were caught up in extraordinary events.