History Quotes - Page 11

History,' Mari muttered, as if she'd overheard his thoughts. 'Why do we need to know what happened before we were born?' 'So hopefully we get smarter and don't make the same mistakes again.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, historians have become both more accurate and more honest—fractionally more brave, one might say—about that 'other' cleansing of the regions and peoples that were ground to atoms between the upper and nether millstones of Hitlerism and Stalinism. One of the most objective chroniclers is Professor Timothy Snyder of Yale University. In his view, it is still 'Operation Reinhardt,' or the planned destruction of Polish Jewry, that is to be considered as the centerpiece of what we commonly call the Holocaust, in which of the estimated 5.7 million Jewish dead, 'roughly three million were prewar Polish citizens.' We should not at all allow ourselves to forget the millions of non-Jewish citizens of Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and other Slav territories who were also massacred. But for me the salient fact remains that anti-Semitism was the regnant, essential, organizing principle of all the other National Socialist race theories. It is thus not to be thought of as just one prejudice among many.

You and I have to rejoice that we have not to answer for our fathers’ crimes, neither shall we do right to charge them one to another. We can only regret it, and flee from it, and from henceforth, let peace and righteousness be written upon our hearts and hands forever.

James Tilly Matthews was not a prophet. He was a gifted, perhaps fragile individual who suffered intensely, and for little if any reward.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.

Bring no harm to the trees, nor burn them with fire, especially those which are fruitful" - Abu Bak's warfare rules, to his army

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.

Here dwell together still two men of noteWho never lived and so can never die:How very near they seem, yet how remoteThat age before the world went all awry.But still the game’s afoot for those with earsAttuned to catch the distant view-halloo:England is England yet, for all our fears–Only those things the heart believes are true.A yellow fog swirls past the window-paneAs night descends upon this fabled street:A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.Here, though the world explode, these two survive,And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

History matters, not because it repeats itself (which it never does), but because its narration can rid demons that torment the oppressed, shock the complacent and intransigent into self-reflection, and inspire feats of human perseverance and will.

A lie near to truth is always difficult to catch

In any theological struggle, the first thousand years are always the bitterest.

The capital amassed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through various forms of slave economy is still in circulation, said De Jong, still bearing interest, increasing many times over and continually burgeoning anew.

How about we be the light of Jesus Christ? There are things we tend to forget when fear becomes the driving force. The world is filled with a lot of questions now; what do we do? Who do we elect? How do we fix this? Some people feel powetless in those ways. Helpless, hopeless, confused, overwhelmed.What do we do?My answer: Stop looking for practical advice "don't be afraid " "those who are with us are more than those who are with them"2 kings 6:16

There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

Manuscript editions didn't immediately die out with the printing explosion that burst across Europe in the 1460s and 1470s. Manuscripts continued to be produced into the 16th century, many decades after presses had spread to most minor cities in Western Europe.

At the end of a century that has seenthe evils of communism, Nazism and other modern tyrannies,the impulse to centralize power remains amazingly persistent.

It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.

The actual truth has never written about any war, and this will be no exception.

Sometimes when you get older—and I'm not talking about you, I'm talking generally, because everyone ages differently—things you think on and wish on start to seem real. And then you believe them, and before you know it they're a part of your history, and if someone challenges you on them and says they're not true—why, then you get offended.

Throughout history, only a small number of people have done the serious thinking for everybody.

Stand up upon the right side, and I shall expound the similitude unto thee.

We assume that anything that is new to us is new to human society as a whole, and that if we don’t see it reflected in history textbooks and in recent memory then it cannot have existed for long.

… between the irrational promoted in churches and the Darwinian pseudo-science taught in schools, a revolution in the way we understand reality is not only necessary but also long overdue.

History is not always pessimistic for if World War II Europe has taught us anything it is that the rebuilding of cities is possible and the mending of a nation’s spirit can be achieved.

One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with full content, but with growing dawn of fulfillment. Instead roars the crash of hell...

I beseech thee, O Lord, let me have understanding: For it was not my mind to be curious of the high things, but of such as pass by us daily.

Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.

When you praise God in pain, it is preparing you for provision.

True heroes don't fall. They only encounter temporary setbacks as they forge ahead towards progress.

An individual is no match for history.

I claim not to have controlled events but confess plainly that events have controlled me.

The idiot willingness to choose sides is what feeds the abattoir of history.

This corner of history was as real as the tiled floor under our feet or the wooden tabletop under our fingers. The people to whom it had happened had actually lived and breathed and felt and thought and then died, as we did - as we would.

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

We usually learn from debates that we seldom learn from debates.

Photos of yesterday give good evidence of how yesterday was and they are a true prove of history!

The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Japan surprised almost everyone but Marty with their attack on Pearl Harbor,

I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians.So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.

A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.

Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.

It was after our breakfast that I was told to go up along with the parlour maid and serve the family breakfast. I was very nervous, but the parlour maid told me not to worry. So up I went, shaking in my boots, and into the breakfast room where the sideboard was laden with kidneys and rice and bacon and all sorts of delicious things. There were just four people at the table: three elderly men and a woman with a green parrot on her shoulder. Now, the thing about the parrot was that it had messed all down her shoulder and all down the front of her dress and she wasn't in the least bothered. She just smiled into the distance and every now and then fed the bird something from her hand.

Surely it is foolish to hate facts. The struggle against the past is a futile struggle. Acceptance seems so much more like wisdom. I know all this. And yet there are some facts that one must never, never accept. This is not merely an emotional matter. The reason that one must hate certain facts is that one must prepare for the possibility of their return. If the past were really past, then one might permit oneself an attitude of acceptance, and come away from the study of history with a feeling of serenity. But the past is often only an earlier instantiation of the evil in our hearts. It is not precisely the case that history repeats itself. We repeat history—or we do not repeat it, if we choose to stand in the way of its repetition. For this reason, it is one of the purposes of the study of history that we learn to oppose it.

When wisdom comes, transformation comes. Wisdom makes the difference between the succeeding man and the failing man.

No man's advice can change you unless you speak to yourself. Bible school or seminars can't change you, going to church can't change you except you decide to change.Psalm 139:23 - 24

In fact, the anti-Muslim stance of much of Hindu nationalism can be construed as partly a displaced hostility against the colonial power which could not be expressed directly because of the new legitimacy created within Hinduism for this power. Such a dynamic would seem to roughly duplicate the displacement of Oedipal hostilities in the authoritarian personality.

Think of tomorrow, the past can't be mended.

All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction.

The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and the viewer.

The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy.

They were lucky. They'd been given history.

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past historians can - it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

In the history of battles and wars, the massacres of civilians were the main reason of revolutions success.

Stone should last forever, but on that night I came to understand that a stone was only another form of dust. Streams of holy dust loomed in the air, and every breath included remnants of the Temple, so that we inhaled that which was meant to stand through eternity.

If you never listen, you can't see. The devil has got so many people so disconnected that they cannot even listen or even sense when the Lord is speaking.

Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh--one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman

I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes.

You make name for yourself when you overcome pain, weakness, laziness and ignorance

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.