Historical Quotes

If the September 11 terror attack is supposed to constitute a caesura in world history, it must be able to stand comparison to other events of world historical impact.

A stone is ingrained with geological and historical memories.

Many novelists take well-defined, precise characters, whose stories are sometimes of mediocre interest, and place them in an important historical context, which remains secondary in spite of everything.

The earliest phase of social formations found in historical as well as in contemporary social structures is this: a relatively small circle firmly closed against neighboring, strange, or in some way antagonistic circles.

I think one of the great historical contributions of science is to weaken the hold of religion. That's a good thing.

The critical principle demanded an examination, for instance, of the contribution of different periods, thus to some extent embarking on historical linguistics.

There is no justifiable prediction about how the hypothesis will hold up in the future; its degree of corroboration simply is a historical statement describing how severely the hypothesis has been tested in the past.

Thus, in accordance with the spirit of the Historical School, knowledge of the principles of the human world falls within that world itself, and the human sciences form an independent system.

There is no self-knowledge but an historical one. No one knows what he himself is who does not know his fellow men, especially the most prominent one of the community, the master's master, the genius of the age.

Pictures can and do make a difference. Strong images of historical events do have an impact on society. They can help with change.

I think that those are the things that you can uniquely do with film that are difficult to do anywhere else: they can bring a picture to life, give it a natural and historical context and make you feel that everything else is suddenly credible.

In my own recent String Trio I attempt to superimpose two quite different sets of formal strategies, both of which, ultimately, refer back to historical precedent.

Usually when I go to a place for the first time, unless there's something historical or spectacular that nature has to offer, the first thing I like to do is see what's on the minds of the people.

Just because a company falls doesn't invalidate what we can learn by studying that company when it was at its historical best.

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

The cardinal responsibility of leadership is to identify the dominant contradiction at each point of the historical process and to work out a central line to resolve it.

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design.

All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.

Fiction has consisted either of placing imaginary characters in a true story, which is the Iliad, or of presenting the story of an individual as having a general historical value, which is the Odyssey.

I have certainly amassed many historical research gathering skills.

I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.

As far as a truly radical conscience, you have to take it as part of a larger thing, that it was sort of historical inevitability that with the coming of a leaguer society people would start to use drugs a lot more then they had before.

That one woman is capable of loving another is an historical truth; but never yet lived one who could not listen to her own praises at the expense of her adored friend.

The story of Jesus is very fascinating. It still has such a tremendous power, even after 2,000 years! We don't really know if he existed as a historical figure.

Without the meditative background that is criticism, works become isolated gestures, historical accidents, soon forgotten.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

For long, history was mainly political history, and historical narrative was confined to an account of the most important crises in political life, or to an account of wars and great generals.

Ever since my youth it has disturbed me that of the literary works that survived their own epoch, so many dealt with historical rather than contemporary subjects.

During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.

We're not leaving; we are just making sure we're not hurt too much by the level of the yen. We are stunned by the yen at 78 or 79 to the dollar, which is a historical high. The country's suffering. My duty is first to make sure Nissan gets unscathed through the turbulence to protect the company, without forgetting the fact we're a Japanese company.