Top 1200 Personal History Quotes & Sayings

No man can be explained by his personal history, least of all a poet.

I thought a lot about Nixon's personal history and the changes in America during his lifetime and tried to craft stories, which I thought reflected some of his personal history but also the backdrop of a changing America. Nixon grew up in a strict Quaker family. The idea of the American Dream, of hard work and not much fun, was ingrained in Nixon as a child, but curiously so was a love of music. Nixon himself was a pretty good piano player. So it's the contradictions that interest me, as I think we all have them.

Getting up for sadhana in the morning is a totally selfish act - for personal strength, for personal intuition, for personal sharpness, for personal discipline, and overall for absolute personal prosperity.

Deceit for personal gain is one of history's most recurring crimes. Man's first step towards change would be thinking, counter-arguing, re-thinking, twisting, straightening, perfecting, then believing every original idea he intends to make public before making it public. There is always an angle from which an absolute truth may appear askew just as there is always a personal emotion, or a personal agenda, which alienates the ultimate good of mankind.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

Personal history must be constantly renewed by telling parents, relatives, and friends everything one does. On the other hand, for the warrior who has no personal history, no explanations are needed; nobody is angry or disillusioned with his acts. And above all, no one pins him down with their thoughts and their expectations.

We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn't it? But if we can't understand time, can't grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history--even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

The Greeks really believed in history. They believed that the past had consequences and that you might be punished for the sins of your father. America, and particularly New York, runs on the idea that history doesn't matter. There is no history. There is only the never-ending present. You don't even have your family because you moved here to get away from them, so even that idea of personal history has been cut at the knees.

I believe in monogamy if that's what a couple decides upon together, but it all depends on the personal history and culture of the two involved.

India has a long history with devotional, even obsessive love, be it for a personal god or for your lover.

I'm familiar with Andrei Sakharov reputation, but I don't know his personal history at all.

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.

I think that the best movies are made, not from a point of view that depends on your personal history, whether it's the color of your skin or the politics that you had or the place that you come from, but from a point of view of an understanding of human nature, an understanding of history, and an understanding of what motivates people.

I think where you're born brings a history with it - a cultural history, a mythical history, an ancestral history, a religious context - and certainly influences your perception of the world and how you interpret everyday reality.

I have such a personal life history with R&B - it's the first music I remember hearing, and it feels like a family tradition.

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

The development of the meaning attaching to the personal self, the conscious being, is the subject matter of the history of psychology.

And then there is our personal history. Memories only we share. Things not another living soul would understand.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

My movies are painfully personal, but I'm never trying to let you know how personal they are. It's my job to make it be personal, and also to disguise that so only I or the people who know me know how personal it is. 'Kill Bill' is a very personal movie.

Because of my personal history, my professional skills and my business achievements, I am a man nobody can expect to compare himself with.

I have to throw in on a personal note that I didn't like history when I was in high school. I didn't study history when I was in college, none at all, and only started to do graduate study when my children were going to graduate school. What first intrigued me was this desire to understand my family and put it in the context of American history. That makes history so appealing and so central to what I am trying to do.

The truth is that History, with its imposing capital H, is simply the amalgamation of many quotidian lives lived in very ordinary ways. History is always personal. If you read Holocaust survivor or American slavery survivor narratives, you realize all too well that these great Historical moments were personal to someone at some time.

God is the Lord of human history and of the personal history of every member of His redeemed family.

Because history is only an aggregate of personal hostilities, personal prejudices, personal blindness and irrationality, there are times when we have to live against it.

I am a critic who is pulled toward history. But Bob Dylan himself is a great historian. He is an historian who acts out history. So it always has a personal stamp. It always has a particular timbre. It always has a particular howl, or a moan, in that voice.

My personal history, along with the history of many black people in this country, is rife with trauma born out of anti-black policies aided and facilitated by presidents and their administrations.

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.

It is best to erase all personal history because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people

The Book of Telling tells of a woman's journey to uncover the secret life of her father and to find herself in the process, an unusual counterpoint between personal history and the history of a young nation. Haunting, powerful, and beautifully written.

Better than anything else in our culture, it enables fathers and sons to speak on a level playing field while building up from within a personal history of shared experience - a group history - that may be tapped into at will in years to come.

I wasn't burdened by a personal history of prejudice. It's part of why I thought Barack could win.

We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal 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.

If, in schools, we keep teaching that history is divided into American history and Chinese history and Russian history and Australian history, we're teaching kids that they are divided into tribes. And we're failing to teach them that we also, as human beings, share problems that we need to work together with.

My personal history is strewn with massive errors in judgment. They're all precious to me.

No individual and no generation has had enough personal experience to ignore the vast experience of the human race that is called history. Yet most of our schools and colleges today pay little attention to history. And many of our current policies repeat mistakes that were made, time and again, in the past with disastrous results.

Money can be a reflection of our perceptions of power, self-esteem, personal history, fears, and happiness.

I needed to talk about my real personal history, in order to become free of it.

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.

This country has a proud history of opening its doors to generations of people fleeing personal persecution, civil unrest and war.

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

Not unlike our country's history, my personal history was founded upon an unfortunate history of racial conflict between black and white.

If people are eating mostly pickles after many generations, where did that come from? It's reflective of history, often a painful history. It's central to a culture, to a history, to a personal story. It's communication at its most fundamental.

We've been here so long. The history and richness runs so deep within the community. We own this. It's personal. It's very personal.

I think I've got a peculiar disease. I call it the curse of history, and it has to do with the fugitive absence/presence of both personal and collective memory. At first I thought it was a kind of personal illness, just related to time, private time, time that passes in one's life. So I decided to forget and throw myself into the future.

Queen songs tend to be about very personal things: personal dreams and personal ambitions.

I feel like I want to keep moving toward idiosyncracy. Personal, personal, personal.

We are in a very critical and sensitive time in this nation. We need our president to sit down with folks who have a personal experience, a deep connection to the horror and the pain of this country`s provocative racial history. If the president wants to have a better understanding and appreciation for what he should do next, he needs to hear something from folks who have gone through this painful history. Without that personal connection to the painful past, it will be hard for him to regain that moral authority from my perspective.

It is said that the history of peoples who have a history is the history of class struggle. It might be said with at least as much truthfulness, that the history of peoples without history is a history of their struggle against the state.

I have always wanted to make a series of films which would be like an 'emotional history' that conveys what it feels like to live through history as an experience rather than a grand story. It would be about the relationship between the tiny fragments and moments of personal experience, and the continual backdrop of big events.

Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

The history of a city was like the history of a family—there is closeness and even affection, but death eventually separates everyone from each other. It is only the vividness of memory that keeps the dead alive forever; a writer’s job is to imagine everything so personally that the fiction is as vivid as our personal memories.

I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude towards history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching.

For me, history is always personal. And it's how your personal history interacts with the history of your time. I'm very attracted to characters who were cursed, as the Chinese say, to live in interesting times.

That boom town [Abu Dhabi] proved to be the reef against which my family crashed, the story of many who seek the promised land, and my poetry is a versification of that personal history. History is all I have.

I'm also fascinated by the interplay between personal history and the larger forces that form the context for our lives.

When I was younger, not being accepted made me enraged, but now, I am not inclined to dismantle my history. If you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes-and we become attached to the heroic strain in our personal history.

At no point in history have so many non-risk-takers, that is, those with no personal exposure, exerted so much control.