Historical Quotations | Page 3

And that's the one thing that people do not understand is that we have very low interest rates and if those go back to historical levels or even go back to scary thoughts that they're back in the late '70s, early '80s, then that's going to really be hard to actually pay off those debts. It's going to be a - it's going to be a very big problem.

What we have to do now is to make the public at large aware that what we're looking at is not a historical event but - and I have to be brutal and I am going to say it - a racket.

There are so many stories to tell in the worlds of science fiction, the worlds of fantasy and horror that to confine yourself to even doing historical revisionist fiction, whatever you want to call it - mash-ups, gimmick lit, absurdist fiction - I don't know if I want to do that anymore.

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.

I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.

Most architects work in studios largely divorced from academia, as if ideas, criticism and historical research were irrelevant.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

I don't really have a historical overview of my work at all. I'm not an art historian. I don't see that there's this period and that period.

I cannot look at modern buildings without thinking of historical ones.

Unquestionably, our contemporary world of music is far richer, in a sense, than earlier periods, due to the historical and geographical extensions of culture to which I have referred.

Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

The popular story is that America was built by immigrants and that, therefore, everything about immigration is good and leads to a more successful society. This narrative is so devoid of historical context that it should embarrass anyone beyond a second-grade education.

I'm not a prophet; I can only use historical reality to come to a view of the future, and my view is that Africa will return to being African and not European. The advent of colonialism was foreign to the country itself, but it will return to what it was before the Europeans arrived.

In the forty years of the people's republic, some of the worst historical traits were preserved in our people. These included even the common characteristics developed in the economic reality of the time of partitions in the 17th and 18th centuries.

I read numerous books - loads in fact - and, as I always do when recording a historical project, immersed myself into the subject matter. I spent many hours at Henrys old homes, such as Hampton Court, and visiting the Tower of London. I read no other books during that period.

I find historical figures in general very tricky because you feel at times that you're serving two masters. Not only the arc and wonderful writing that comes with the show, but also the history of a person's life.

It's very important to always put things in their historical contexts. It teaches important lessons about the country in question.

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.

We are journeying externally from country to country. We are traveling in historical time, from the present to the distant past. We are traveling inwardly as well, through the music of meditation.

With high fashion, it's a performance. You're trying to interpret a fantasy in a very physical way, and you really are playing a character. I've played men, dead people, famous people, historical icons, and it's no mean feat. It's quite an insular experience even though the crowd is in front of you and there's an expectation.

I mean, every novel's a historical novel anyway. But calling something a historical novel seems to put mittens on it, right? It puts manners on it. And you don't want your novels to be mannered.

It's something I'd find rather distracting in a historical piece, looking at characters that have obviously just gotten off their Ab Blaster. You see a piece set in the 1300s or the 1800s, and you've got characters who have perfect abs and are incredibly well-groomed, not a hair out of place, and it just doesn't make sense.

We need a common enemy to unite us.

We must teach our people the greatness of China's historical culture. In our educational program we must stress Chinese history and geography so that all may know and appreciate China's civilization of five thousand years and the far-flung boundaries of our ancient race. This will engender a greater faith in our own future.

I don't look at myself as a historical icon, but the reality of it is, yeah, I am playing for history now.

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

When I was at Stratford, the very first thing that I was commissioned to work on was trying to make a musical out of the documentary material about the General Strike, which was the next big historical event in England, after the First World War.

The New Testament is not a historical document.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.

I have a fondness for historical fiction, something wondrous like 'Wolf Hall,' but I'll read most anything as long as the story grabs my mind or my heart, and preferably both. You would be hard pressed, however, to find science fiction on my shelves.

The historical problem of the United States is to admit that it is a multiracial and multi-ethnic nation.

I enjoyed studying costume, learning about the corsetry and the historical context of fashion. I never had any real intention of being a costume designer.

I like the stories with the historical themes.

A little group of willful men, representing no opinion but their own, have rendered the great government of the United States helpless and contemptible.

A publisher saw one of my historical novels and thought I would write an admirable detective story, so she offered me a two-book contract, and I grabbed it.

History buffs expect historical background in historical fiction. Mystery readers expect forensics and police procedure in crime fiction. Westerns - gasp - describe the West. Techno-thriller readers expect to learn something about technology from their fiction.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

Liberty has never come from Government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.

Historical hypocrites have themselves carried out the very human rights abuses that they suddenly decide warrant intervention elsewhere.

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory.

Even if you're playing the most well-known repertoire under the sun, I still believe you have a responsibility as an artist to tell the audience why you're playing it, what are the key aspects to it, and then throw in a bit about its historical context.

The number of elements that have to go into a hit would break a computer down. the right season for that play, the right historical moment, the right tonality.

The higher American patriotism, on the other hand, combines loyalty to historical tradition and precedent with the imaginative projection of an ideal national Promise.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

Research can be a big clunker. It's difficult to know how you can make the historical light.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

What I found was when I started my first study, and then in subsequent studies, is here you have people under some kind of duress, or I chose to study them because they represented some kind of historical event, as it impacted on them or as they helped to create it.

Something that came as a shock to me is that we do not have a constitutional right to vote. And that's not just a fun little historical factoid. It actually has huge ramifications. It's the reason our system is so decentralized - in other words, chaotic.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

The exposure I have had to beautiful materials across the world, from Japan to Italy, enables me to pull design ideas together. This, combined with years of historical research, has created a great fountain of ideas for me.

Historical experience shows that a crisis causes either a recovery or catastrophic consequences.

Conflicts are never caused in any simple way by identity, culture or economics. Where resources are scarce, or there are strong historical memories of conflict, small events are more likely to inflame passions.

The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.

Since the rise of Homo sapiens, human beings have been the smartest minds around. But very shortly - on a historical scale, that is - we can expect technology to break the upper bound on intelligence that has held for the last few tens of thousands of years.

It can be a long gap between the emergence of fully researched historical biographies.

Blending consensus historical events and personages with imaginary occult forces is a strong recipe for counterfactual storytelling goodness that combines the best of two worlds: resonant history with wild-eyed fantasy.

There is very strong historical data that suggests the way societies grow is by making large, long-term investments.

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

I don't think the British carry a historical consciousness either.

A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect.

If anything, Brown is more oriented towards the other side of the Atlantic than Blair. Most of his reforming ideas and intellectual influences seem to come from the United States, and in a recent speech he went to great lengths to emphasise the historical affinity and shared characteristics of the U.K. and the U.S.

At the close of my visit, my Hawaiian friends urged me strongly to publish my impressions and experiences, on the ground that the best books already existing, besides being old, treat chiefly of aboriginal customs and habits now extinct, and of the introduction of Christianity and subsequent historical events.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy's, I remember vividly.

Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by the 'disenchantment of the world.' Precisely the ultimate and most sublime values have retreated from public life either into the transcendental realm of mystic life or into the brotherliness of direct and personal human relations. It is not accidental that our greatest art is intimate and not monumental.

I have to write three books a year to make a reasonable living out of writing - unless, of course, she gets a major American film deal. Phryne has been optioned since the very first book, but to make a historical TV movie, it costs $30,000 a day extra for the historical detail to be correct, so most people aren't doing it.

'The Borgias' is quite good because it does stick quite steadfastly to historical fact, so a lot of people who are interested in the historical element will love watching it, but they were also a ridiculously dramatic family.

In historical messianism, the reign of the Messiah is brought about by a Jewish ruler powerful enough to gather the Jewish exiles back to the land of Israel, reestablish a Torah government there, and rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem.

However, the difficulties and pleasures of the writing itself are similar for a novel with a historical setting and a novel with a contemporary setting, as far as I'm concerned.

Most people can't tell now who wrote what. I like that blurring of identities within the band. because it becomes a unified thing that can't be related to other forms of historical poetry

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

I'm a big fan of historical fiction stuff. Historical battles - 'Gladiators,' 'The Patriot.'

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare's plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

It sort of filtered into their subconscious through motion pictures, but it's an historical secret. This - whatever this is - needs to be studied and, in a kind of definitive way, talked about.

One of the questions I face when working on a book about a historical event is whether I should visit the actual place that I'm writing about. No matter how scrupulously maintained a historic house or battlefield may be, it is nothing like it was in the long-ago past.

I think it's important to understand that in the big historical context of things, there has been land degradation from civilisation since the beginning of history. I mean, the Rajputana desert in India is a manmade desert caused by overgrazing.

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

The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.

Even though the society that Marx foresaw is far from being an historical reality, Marxism has penetrated so deeply in history that we are all Marxists, one way or another, even unknowingly.

Technology is rooted in the past. It dominates the present and tends into the future. It is a real historical movement - one of the great movements which shape and represent their epoch.

Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.

Mischief springs from the power which the moneyed interest derives from a paper currency which they are able to control, from the multitude of corporations with exclusive privileges... which are employed altogether for their benefit.

Apparently, a democracy is a place where numerous elections are held at great cost without issues and with interchangeable candidates.

With the backdrop of its geostrategic location and historical ties with the Middle East, Turkey has an essential role to play for the stability, peace and social development of the region.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

But every historical statement and legitimization itself moves within a certain relation to history.

I'd love to do historical pictures more, but I don't know if I can.

Government is an association of men who do violence to the rest of us.

We want to overcome our historical problems with Chile. The sea has divided us and the sea must bring us back together again. Chile has agreed, for the first time, to talk about sea access for Bolivia.

Typically, historical black colleges and universities like Delaware State, attracted students who were raised in an environment where going to college wasn't the next natural step after high school.

It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.

I'm not really frightened by experimenting - that's the main thing. I really like mixing very old beautiful pieces that are from thrift shops or that have some historical value with quite new futuristic things.

A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism.

I've been impressed, over the last 15 years, with how often the somewhat conspiratorial comments of Haitian villagers have been proven to be correct when the historical record is probed carefully.