history

History may be just bones and ruins to you, but it is people, Janet. People loving, hurting, and dying.

Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.

In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.

Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.

It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it.

Well, that was one thing you had to give [Makann] credit for. He wanted to run out the Gilgameshers. Everybody was in favor of that.Now, Trask could remember something he'd gotten from Harkaman. There had been Hitler, back at the end of the First Century Pre-Atomic; hadn't he gotten into power because everybody was in favor of running out the Christians, or the Moslems, or the Albigensians, or somebody?

I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

The history of man is a must read poetry.

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.

Much of history turns out to be the consequence of small acts of fortune, accident or luck, good or bad.

He would come to feel that history, even more than memory, distorts the present of the past by focusing on big events and making one forget that most people living in the present are otherwise preoccupied, that for them omens often don't exist.

At the age of nineteen [44 BC] on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distortit to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We__e gone to events that claimed to be historic fashionshows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. Aswe heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we hadgone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrelshow featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called __iving history_ events really are that bigoted.When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are __usthaving fun._ What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhapsthey are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child whogoes home bruised and weeping. It__ time someone stood up for the past.I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every socialspecies, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts.The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with mindssufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; thesum of all interactions determine the nature of societies.At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based aroundrace, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being trulyopen-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women__ rights, yet have anappallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges arevoting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at theidea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirablerights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, __ disagree with what yousay but I will fight to the death for your right to say it._3 Many modern Americans seem to haveperverted this to, __ will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.__hen we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When wequestion stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance ingeneral.

A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.

Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.

Numerous times throughout history, a single person has made a tremendous impact on the world. I don__ know why anyone would think that can__ still happen.