Historical Quotations

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

We may brave human laws, but we cannot resist natural ones.

The things shamans deal with are extremely practical. They break down parameters of normal historical reality. Magical passes are just one aspect of that.

I've played so many historical characters because most horrible dictators are short, fat, middle-aged men.

I would not hesitate to say I was addicted to the Internet in the first two years. It can be addictive, and things not taken in moderation have negative effects. But the alarmism around 'Facebook is changing our brains' strikes me as a kind of historical trick. Because we now know from brain science that everything changes our brains.

The idea of making a film - a film that I had certainly never seen before - about the slave experience was a huge responsibility. It's a project that requires a wider understanding of the geopolitical nature of the slave trade, of historical and modern-day racism.

Actual Victorian mores and politics were a reaction to a specific series of historical events, technological and scientific developments, and ethical trends in which the commodification of people was de rigueur.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

The only conclusion you can draw from the real historical movement is that by and large, in day-to-day life, what Lenin called trade union consciousness dominates the working class. I would call it elementary class consciousness of the working class.

It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

No, this customary aim of research by excavators is completely foreign to the historical work with which I am occupied... my sole and only aim is to be able to establish a historical fact, on which I disagree with some eminent historians and geographers.

I am not a fan of historical fiction that is sloppy in its research or is dishonest about the real history.

I have always made an effort to render every detail of my reality with the greatest accuracy; but I have never paid attention to whether my presentation of historical facts was an exact one.

History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

My final historical romance came out December 2005. While I enjoyed writing medieval romances, I was also dying to write something with more edge.

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

I only did my duty to my country when I tried to oppose the criminal folly of Hitler

In the long march of history, at least two poles of attraction and antagonism have been the norm in world politics. Rarely has only one nation carried the burden of leadership. The unipolar world of the 21st century, dominated for the past two decades by the United States, is a historical anomaly.

The Renaissance is studded by the names of the artists and architects, with their creations recorded as great historical events.

Epilepsy is a disease in the shadows. Patients are often reluctant to admit their condition - even to close family, friends or co-workers - because there's still a great deal of stigma and mystery surrounding the disease that plagued such historical figures as Julius Caesar, Edgar Allan Poe and Lewis Carroll.

I didn't want to be an actor. I wanted to design historical movies like 'Ben-Hur'. I saw this as my life.

You'll notice that my books offer great variety. Some are for adults, some for children and some for teens. There are mysteries, historical novels, picture books, love stories and stories of crisis and courage.

I'm basically an optimist because I do think there's this historical modernisation process, and by and large it's been very beneficial to people. But there are blips. History doesn't proceed in a linear way.

My church has an historical emphasis on peace, but we can't enjoy peace without honoring the blood our soldiers shed for it.

Free election of masters does not abolish the masters or the slaves.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

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

Chance doesn't mean meaningless randomness, but historical contingency. This happens rather than that, and that's the way that novelty, new things, come about.

We Spaniards know a sickness of the heart that only gold can cure.

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

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.

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

Critical and liberating dialogue, which presupposes action, must be carried on with the oppressed at whatever the stage of their struggle for liberation. The content of that dialogue can and should vary in accordance with historical conditions and the level at which the oppressed perceive reality.

I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous.

I'm fascinated by failure, and I'm fascinated by finality. Shakespeare's historical plays are more universal than his comedies because they relate to the finality of life. Without finality, life would not be beautiful.

Typically, an historic site is considered by the National Park Service to contain a single historical feature, while generally a National Historic Park extends beyond single properties or buildings.

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.

I have a bee in my bonnet as to how few black historical figures one sees on film; incredible stories, stories from which we are living the legacy and which just don't get made.

Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that the Ten Commandments are a historical document that contains moral, ethical, and legal truisms that any person of any religion or even an atheist can recognize and appreciate.

If war comes upon us, it will come as a thief in the night

Writing historical novels can be dangerous. We need to be as accurate and as fair about the historical record as we can be, at the same time as creating our fictional characters and, hopefully, telling a good story. The challenge is weaving the fiction into the history.

I've tried to write from my own understanding of identity in all my comics, whether it's about superheroes or historical conflicts or monkey gods.

'Boardwalk' begins literally on the first day of Prohibition, which I think was a wonderful way to start - to have the story kind of come out of this massive historical phenomenon. And the more I researched the '20s, the more I discovered just how interesting it was.

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

The dogma of woman's complete historical subjection to men must be rated as one of the most fantastic myths ever created by the human mind.

I love writing Christmas stories, especially of the historical variety.

Christianity is a very historical religion - it makes specific claims that are open to testing.

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

We have gotten away from this double aspect of either putting the character back into historical events or of making a historical event of his very life.

We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force.

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

To those who don't know the historical truth, I would like to say today, Poland was not an aggressor but a victim during the Second World War.

The characters in my stories, whether historical or fictional, usually prove to be a compilation of influences taken from differing sources, but never drawn from one model.

Obviously, I love to do both contemporary and historical fiction. When a hint of a story grabs me, I try to go with it to see where it will take me whatever the setting.

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.

It had never occurred to me to write a historical novel, but then I found Hadley in the pages of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' and wanted to know more about her - who she was, how she and Ernest met and fell in love, what it was like for her to be married to such a demanding and stormy force of nature.

In a continent but recently settled, many parts of which have as yet little historical or cultural background, the material for this volume has been gathered from a section that was one of the first to be colonized.

The production of antibody is not the only, nor I believe the most important, manifestation of immunity, but for reasons both historical and of experimental convenience, antibody is likely to remain the touchstone of immunological theory.

I was living in Paris, which is a very beautiful, very wonderful place, but a tight place as a city, a tight place culturally. Its people are very brilliant, thoughtful, the place functions, but it's a historical place in some ways, like a big museum.

I find my characters and stories in many varied places; sometimes they pop out of newspaper articles, obscure historical texts, lively dinner party conversations and some even crawl out of the dusty remote recesses of my imagination.

One of the great lessons I learned about historical fiction from writing 'Loving Frank' is that you don't try to disguise what people did; my approach was to try to understand the characters and why they did what they did.

Testimony should be a philosophical problem and not limited to legal or historical contexts where it refers to the account of a witness who reports what he has seen.

I've found that readers of historical romances really like series because they get to revisit characters and find out what happens with them. I've done several series.

As an historical novelist - there are few jobs more retrospective. I dumped science at an early age.

I got nice rejections explaining that historical fiction was a difficult sell. But I kept trying.

I freely admit that I took great license in writing 'The Dark Queen,' more so than my other historical romance novels. This is largely because I viewed the book as a fantasy novel as much as an historical. I do feel that writers should strive for as much accuracy as possible but, in the end, remember that we are writing fiction.

I write novels, mostly historical ones, and I try hard to keep them accurate as to historical facts, milieu and flavor.

I love going to flea markets especially when I am traveling, because I love seeing the stuff of other cultures, handicrafts and things with historical content.

As a citizen of the post-historical variety, I am in continual mourning and prepared for worse.

One of the things I enjoy most about writing historical romance is researching inspiring backgrounds and settings.

There is nothing new except what has been forgotten.

One very important aspect of our contemporary musical culture - some might say the supremely important aspect - is its extension in the historical and geographical senses to a degree unknown in the past.

Because the New Testament provides the primary historical source for information on the resurrection, many critics during the 19th century attacked the reliability of these biblical documents.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

According to this view, democracy is a product of western culture, and it cannot be applied to the Middle East which has a different cultural, religious, sociological and historical background.

For me, Dracula has always been associated with travel and beautiful historical places.

I guess there was a little bit of a slight rebellion, maybe a little bit of a renegade desire that made me realize at some point in my adolescence that I really liked pictures that told stories of things - genre paintings, historical paintings - the sort of derivatives we get in contemporary society.

I had no interest in history classes. In fact, I used to sleep in history classes, I used to bunk classes. But that is how students are supposed to be, no? I developed an interest in history much later. I have made a few films based on historical facts.

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

It was clear to me that the forms of consciousness of our inherited and acquired historical education - aesthetic consciousness and historical consciousness - presented alienated forms of our true historical being.

Nothing will ever top 'The Wire.' It was historical. It was black cinema.

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

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

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

By seeing the problem of poverty merely in terms of assistance, we overlook that our enormous economic advantage is deeply tainted by how it accumulated over the course of one historical process that has devastated the societies and cultures of four continents.

I've just written a very gritty, non-magical take on the King Arthur legend, 'Here Lies Arthur,' and I'm currently toying with some other historical ideas, as well as working with the illustrator David Wyatt on some sequels to my Victorian space opera 'Larklight.'

'Floating Worlds,' published in 1975 and the lone science fiction novel by acclaimed historical novelist Cecelia Holland, was unique in being completely devoid of the usual pulp influences present in much space opera up to that time.

In 1976, I read a book by Kathleen E. Woodiwiss and knew immediately that I, too, could write a historical romance. It took me a year to complete the manuscript. I was a forty-year-old Scarborough housewife who knew no one in publishing.

The House of Lords is like a glass of champagne that has stood for five days

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science

All historical experience demonstrates the following: Our earth cannot be changed unless in the not too distant future an alteration in the consciousness of individuals is achieved.

To avoid entangling alliances has been a maxim of our policy ever since the days of Washington, and its wisdom no one will attempt to dispute.

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.

He who puts out his hand to stop the wheel of history will have his fingers crushed.

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.

As a historical legacy, the Kashmir conflict has been an outstanding issue for more than half a century.

Bourgeois class domination is undoubtedly an historical necessity, but, so too, the rising of the working class against it. Capital is an historical necessity, but, so too, its grave digger, the socialist proletariat.

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.