Quotes about History

"Playing" the resources of characterology for the sake of clarification and insight into the structures of actual existence is many times more daunting than playing a piano; it requires the thinking of chords of thoughts, not just isolated simplisms or abstracta; it demands the shaping or encompassing of morphological modes of intelligence that can comprehend gestalten, syndromes, historical and civilizational patterns in which it is not the particulars but their interactive significance (as an ensemble of actualities or principles) that is vital.

Words: they can't be changed, rewound, or taken back, they make their mark signing into the guestbook of history

What do you suppose has changed in twenty-five years or so? I found the journal to be well written back then when someone or other left it behind. I thought it set things out rather nicely, addressing the events of the day, which are, of course, the same events of this day. Think of it. Even if its theater and its motives are being played out in a different geography, there's still war, isn't there? Still avidity and hate and violence and fear. Poverty and righteousness are still thriving. As are revolution and arrogance and lies. There is always perversion and torment, of course. What I particularly admired about this paper was the shrewd touch of pathos and poignancy strewn among the squalor and the filth. You know, The Good News... 

Should nostalgia move me, I can view the nightly news broadcasts from Rome or Milan. As I might an old movie. But unlike when I watch an old movie, the news broadcasts leave me empty, angry, and I must tell myself yet again that one need tune in only once in a lifetime to the nightly news to know the chronic story of man. To know how wrong the world is. How wronged it is.

The first revolution of the Western Hemisphere was that of the slaves of Saint Domingue (present-day Haiti) at the end of the eighteenth century, followed more than a century later by the Mexican revolution of the decade of 1910, and fifty years after that by the Cuban revolution. And if I do not cite here either the famous "American revolution" or that of the Spanish colonies that soon followed, it is because those only transferred the power of decision from the metropolis to the colonists so that they could go on doing the same thing, pursue the same project with even greater brutality, but without having to share the profits with the "mother country."

Whether because of our ignorance or pride, we've turned a collective deaf ear to the whispers of wisdom from the past. - Chap Clark and Kara E. Powell

Yesterday is history.
Tomorrow is a mystery.
Today is a gift

"The thing people forget when they are looking for solutions is there is nothing final in history."

Since winners write the history, the false propaganda used from the beginning to the end is often accepted as the true history of the war.

Christ, the historical Christ, was not crucified.... He had no intention of dying in that manner; but others felt that to fulfill the prophecies in all ways, a crucifiction was a necessity. Christ did not take part in it. There was a conspiracy in which Judas played a role, an attempt to make a martyr out of Christ. The man chosen was drugged and told he was the Christ - hence the necessity of helping him carry the cross (see Luke 23). He was one of those deluded who believed that he, not the historical Christ , was to fulfill the prophecies. ...Out of compassion Mary was present. The group responsible wanted it to appear that one particular portion of Jews had crucified Christ, and never dreamed that the whole Jewish people ould be "blamed".  p366-367

History is philosophy learned from examples.

Live out of your imagination, not your history.

There is no nobler profession, nor no greater calling, than to be among those unheralded many who gave and give their lives to the preservation of human knowledge, passed with commitment and care from one generation to the next.

History remembers only the celebrated, genealogy remembers them all.

Even as regards Earth we are more committed to history than to geography, more committed to time than to space. History is endless. Place is limited.

The success or failure of any historical age is the extent to which those living at that time have fulfilled the special role that history has imposed upon them.

"An ounce of history is worth a pound of logic."

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.

The marvel of all history is the patience with which men and women submit to burdens unnecessarily laid upon them by their governments.

If a glimpse of the future is possible, it must come from an intimacy with the present clarified by the great works of the past. 

"You have delivered up our holy German Fatherland to one of the greatest demagogues of all time.  I solemnly prophesy that this accursed man will cast our Reich into the abyss and bring our nation to inconceivable misery.  Future generations will damn you in your grave for what you have done."

Man lives consciously for himself, but is an unconscious instrument in the attainment of the historic, universal aims of humanity.

History is a selective interpretation of events intended to justify those currently in power. Memory is the same thing on an individual scale.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

What are the facts? Again and again and again—what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history"; what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!

Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it.

No civilization can exist part free and part slave.

..We have never had any other kind of civilization. It has always been that way. There has always been a division of man. There has always been the conqueror and conquered--the master and slave--the ruler and the ruled--the oppressor and the oppressed. There has never been content nor unity. There has been only discontent and disunity.

"Nadie conoce lo que ha trabajado el negro°

Where history and hope battle for control of the future, hope will win every time.

Only the limits of mystery predict the future, not the limits of history.