Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carl Clinton Van Doren

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

Marissa Moss

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

Thomas Mallon

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Tom Hulce

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Brian Eno

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Kara Walker

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

Edward Said

We are at a point in our work when we can no longer ignore empires and the imperial context in our studies. (p. 5)

Edward Said

Every empire, however, tells itself and the world that it is unlike all other empires, that its mission is not to plunder and control but to educate and liberate.

Dana Gioia

Old empires always appeal to modern poets more than new ones.

Edward Gibbon

The history of empires is the history of human misery.

Dean Acheson

Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role.

Cardinal Richelieu

A single word has sometimes lost or won an empire...

Donald Rumsfeld

We don't seek empires.We're not imperialistic.

Daniel Pinkwater

If the English had deep-dish pizza they could have kept their empire.

John Boyd Orr

In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without.

Carlos Fuentes

Religion is dogmatic. Politic is ideological. Reason must be logical, but literature has a privilege of being equivocal.

Charles Dickens

The civility which money will purchase, is rarely extended to those who have none.

Charles Dickens

Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes and prism, are all very good words for the lips.

Charles Dickens

I made a compact with myself that in my person literature should stand by itself, of itself, and for itself.

Charles Caleb Colton

If we steal thoughts from the moderns, it will be cried down as plagiarism; if from the ancients, it will be cried up as erudition.

Charles Caleb Colton

There is nothing more imprudent than excessive prudence.

Charles Caleb Colton

Bigotry murders religion to frighten fools with her ghost.

Charles Caleb Colton

The Grecian’s maxim would indeed be a sweeping clause in Literature; it would reduce many a giant to a pygmy; many a speech to a sentence; and many a folio to a primer.

Charles Caleb Colton

Those that are the loudest in their threats are the weakest in their actions.