Top 1200 Oral History Quotes & Sayings - Page 17

Written history may, in the course of its narrative, use some of the laws established by the various sciences, but its own task remains that of relating the essential sequence of historical action and, qua history, to tell what happened, not why.

what are the objects of an useful American education? classical knowlege, modern languages & chiefly French, Spanish, & Italian; Mathematics; Natural philosophy; Natural History; Civil History; Ethics.

The history of lead is a history of neglect. It's a history of decisions on our part not to address the broad implications of what we did to ourselves during the industrial revolution and in the first part of the century when our cities expanded broadly, when we built our housing and we began to depend upon lead as a mainstay of our new industrial culture. We put this stuff in even though we knew it was dangerous, we knew it was going to hurt kids.

Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life.

So when I read this story, it unlocked a volcano of unanswered questions, because the questions had never been asked. It was an opportunity to come to terms with the lot of repressed history - and history of repression.

That period of history has always fascinated me - Greek history, Greek mythology.

I didn't see it as someone who worked as hard as I did. But now that Saint Laurent is part of history, it makes me a part of history, so, yes, finally it's not such a bad thing to have been a muse.

We make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.

As history stands, it is a sort of Chinese play, without end andl without lesson. With these impressions I wrote the last line of my History, asking for a round century before going further.

The tapestry of history that seems so full of tragedy when viewed from the front has countless comic scenes woven into its reverse side. In truth, tragedy and comedy are the twin masks of history - its mass appeal.

All history, and most especially the history of the 20th century, argues against placing ideas in the saddle and allowing them to ride mankind. Too often, they end up riding individual men and women into mass graves.

I love history. Everything is inspired by history, so that's why I love vintage and antiques.

The future of narrative? Built in, part of the human template. Not going away. The future of the codex book, with pages and so forth? A platform for transmitting narratives. There are others. The scroll is coming back (Twitter is a scroll.) Short forms are returning online. Interactivity is coming back; it was always there in oral storytelling. Each form has its pluses and its minuses.

Though I'm not religious, I am interested in religion. I read a lot of history and I think it came out of that. I just think I couldn't understand certain eras of history without knowing what these people believed in.

Aristotle may be regarded as the cultural barometer of Western history. Whenever his influence dominated the scene, it paved the way for one of history's brilliant eras; whenever it fell, so did mankind.

President Barack Obama has stood watch over the greatest job loss in modern American history. And that, my friends, is one inconvenient truth that will haunt this President throughout history.

Who says history is stagnant? For a historian, facts do not change; it is the way we look at things, our interpretations, that are always changing. This is what makes history exciting - that we can always find something new in what is old.

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate. It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. None. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background.

The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.

What would happen if history could be rewritten as casually as erasing a blackboard? Our past would be like the shifting sands at the seashore, constantly blown this way or that by the slightest breeze. History would be constantly changing every time someone spun the dial of a time machine and blundered his or her way into the past. History, as we know it, would be impossible. It would cease to exist.

The birth control pill, to a great degree, made possible the (hetero)sexual revolution. Yet those who developed oral contraceptives did not intend their work to promote what the majority of Americans at the time called "promiscuity." Doctors generally refused to prescribe the pill to women who were not married; the Supreme Court did not rule this practice unconstitutional until 1972.

Doing voice work is more like recording music that people are going to listen to. You're creating an oral experience using whatever bells and whistles you have in your voice, and you can shut your eyes and use your imagination and nobody's going to see if the faces you make don't match the voices you make. That's a lot of fun.

Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history.

There's a lot of history in Boston and a lot of history, obviously, in New York with all the championships.

As a universal history of philosophy, the history of philosophy must become one great unity.

If cats could write history, their history would be mostly about cats.

Very few college professors want high school graduates in their history class who are simply "gung ho" and "rah-rah" with regard to everything the United States has ever done, have never thought critically in their life, don't know the meaning of the word "historiography" and have never heard of it. They think that history is something you're supposed to memorize and that's about it. That's not what high school, or what college history teachers want.

I know Leeds have had a few Scottish captains but I don't look too much to that because you can get lost in the history of the club. There's so much good history but it's all about the present and the future.

There are times throughout history and it doesn't take long for either an American or a German, to think about times in the history of their country where the law provided the Government to do things which were not right.

The history of women is the history of the worst form of tyranny the world has ever known. The tyranny of the weak over the strong. It is the only tyranny that lasts.

We may observe in some of the abrupt grounds we meet with, sections of great masses of strata, where it is as easy to read the history of the sea, as it is to read the history of Man in the archives of any nation.

In the history of the hip hop world...there has been one, single, solitary human being in the history of the world. One female rapper to sell more albums than me in the first week.

China's culture and history are closely related to my living environment. This country is my birthplace. It is also where I grew up. Its culture and history shape my relations with family, friends, society, and daily life.

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.

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.

Yes, your family history has some sad chapters. But your history doesn't have to be your future. The generational garbage can stop here and now.

Pick up any history book, and I suggest you begin with studying the 20th century, and you will find that a large part of the history of our species has all the characteristics we would normally associate with a nightmare or an insane hallucination.

In Rome, I particularly love the history, churches, sculptures and architecture and the fact that you can walk along a tiny cobbled street and turn the corner to find the Trevi Fountain. London is evocative of other eras and full of history.

History may be servitude. History may be freedom. See, now they vanish. The faces and places, with the self which, as it could, loved them, to become renewed, transfigured, in another pattern.

I met some people who help in an archeological project in the South Pacific, between sailing to the Marquesas, which is an island group not too far from Tahiti, and I think, Wouldn't that be great? I have such a fascination with history and especially history in my own country.

Ignorant of history, we find it easy to accept our isolation from one another. We are more able to recognize differences than shared experiences and perspectives. History proclaims our common humanity.

The law cannot save those who deny it but neither can the law serve any who do not use it. The history of injustice and inequality is a history of disuse of the law.

After Nixon resigned in 1974, he engaged in a very aggressive war with history, attempting to wipe out the Watergate stain and memory. Happily, history won, largely because of Nixon's tapes.

History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.'

Yeah, I read history. But it doesn't make you nice. Hitler read history, too.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

The visual information of art history is going to students seamlessly, without the enormous trouble those of us who are older had when we studied art history many years ago.

Ancient Egypt was a Negro Civilization. The history of Black Africa will remain suspended in air and cannot be written correctly until African historians dare to connect it with the history of Egypt.

No doubt one may quote history to support any cause, as the devil quotes scripture; but modern history is not a very satisfactory side-arm in political polemics; it grows less and less so.

The intrusion of history is not just theoretical. It is also the legacy of being an accomplice or a victim, or just an onlooker. In each case, history entails the uncomfortable presence of earlier unresolved roles.

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

The 'black armband' view of our history reflects a belief that most Australian history since 1788 has been little more than a disgraceful story of imperialism, exploitation, racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination. I take a very different view. I believe that the balance sheet of our history is one of heroic achievement and that we have achieved much more as a nation of which we can be proud of than which we should be ashamed.

The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence.

That is the danger we now face. And this is why the intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history. We must remember the history, and be certain that what we present to the world as knowledge is disinterested and honest.

The history of thought, of knowledge, of philosophy, of literature seems to be seeking, and discovering, more and more discontinuities, whereas history itself appears to be abandoning the irruption of events in favor of stable structures.

The democratic aspiration is no mere recent phase in human history. It is human history.

History is the art of making an argument about the past by telling a story accountable to evidence. In the writing of history, a story without an argument fades into antiquarianism; an argument without a story risks pedantry. Writing history requires empathy, inquiry, and debate. It requires forswearing condescension, cant, and nostalgia. The past isn’t quaint. Much of it, in fact, is bleak.

The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it's actually a very empowering side of our history.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

I didn't really know a lot of the history when I was younger. I didn't realize that the harp is coded in such a specific way in musical circles. It's kind of this society instrument because of its history as a young woman's parlor instrument.