Historical Events Quotes

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

  Arthur Erickson

  Artist, Names, Historical

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• When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history.

  Charlotte Mary Yonge

  Taken, Character, Historical

  Charlotte Mary Yonge (2015). “Delphi Complete Novels of Charlotte Mary Yonge (Illustrated)”, p.7498, Delphi Classics

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• History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon.

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Inspirational, War, Past

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• History is an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Lying, History, Soldier

  Cynic's Word Book (1906) p. 161

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• History - an account, mostly false, of events, mostly unimportant

  John Barth

  History, Knaves, Events

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• 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.

  Raymond Queneau

  Character, Historical, Events

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• 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.

  Ibrahim Babangida

  Believe, Historical, Events

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• Any single historical event is too complex to be adequately known by anyone. It transcends all the intellectual capacities of men. Our practice is to wait until a sufficient number of details have been forgotten. Of course things seem simpler then! Our memories work that way; we retain the facts which are easiest to think about.

  B. F. Skinner

  Memories, Men, Thinking

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• Believing things on authority only means believing them because you have been told them by someone you think trustworthy. Ninety-nine per cent of the things you believe are believed on authority... Every historical event in the world is believed on authority. None of us has seen the Norman Conquest or the defeat of the Armada.

  C. S. Lewis

  Believe, Mean, Thinking

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• This is an important point about symbols: they do not refer to historical events; they refer through historical events to spiritual or psychological principles and powers that are of yesterday, today, and tomorrow, and that are everywhere.

  Joseph Campbell

  Spiritual, Yesterday, Historical

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• In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

  John Green

  Religious, Men, Historical

  John Green (2008). “Looking for Alaska”, p.39, Penguin

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• History is opaque. You see what comes out, not the script that produces events, [...] The generator of historical events is different from the events themselves, much as the minds of the gods cannot be read just by witnessing their deeds.

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb

  Historical, Mind, Events

  Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2016). “Incerto 4-Book Bundle: Fooled by Randomness The Black Swan The Bed of Procrustes Antifragile”, p.785, Random House

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• All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.

  Aldo Leopold

  Team, Men, Land

  "A Sand County Almanac: And Sketches Here and There". Book by Aldo Leopold, "The Land Ethic", p. 203-204, 1949.

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• Bertrand Russell said, 'Electricity is not a thing like St. Paul's Cathedral; it is a way in which things behave.' And it's not 'they' who say, but Walter Benjamin who said, 'Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness, with the base and the banal.' In September, 1940, Benjamin died under ambiguous circumstances in the French-Spanish border town of Portbou, while attempting to flee the Nazis.

  Mary Jo Bang

  Historical, Events, Borders

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• I accept the resurrection of Easter Sunday not as an invention of the community of disciples, but as a historical event.

  Pinchas Lapide

  Easter, Sunday, Community

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• Natalie Bakopoulos has that rare gift, the ability to imagine a traumatic historical event in the form of individual lives and ordinary details. The Green Shore is compelling, personal, and full of quietly real moments.

  Elizabeth Kostova

  Real, Historical, Events

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• 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.

  Ernst Zundel

  Historical, Events, Racket

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• Much more than an entertaining set of exaggerated facts, fiction is a metaphoric method of describing, dramatizing and condensing historical events, personal actions, psychological states and the symbolic knowledge encoded within the collective unconscious; things, events and conditions that are otherwise too diffuse and/or complex to be completely digested or appreciated by the prevailing culture.

  Tom Robbins

  Collective Unconscious, Historical, Fiction

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• What is the cause of historical events? Power. What is power? Power is the sum total of wills transferred to one person. On what condition are the willso fo the masses transferred to one person? On condition that the person express the will of the whole people. That is, power is power. That is, power is a word the meaning of which we do not understand.

  Leo Tolstoy

  People, Historical, Causes

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• The true story is that black people need to tell their history. Very few films are made by black people about slavery. That itself is a crime because slavery is a very important historical event that has held our people hostage. Forget white people's role in it. In the end what's important is black people remain and live with the scars and psychological issues.

  Haile Gerima

  White, Issues, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

  Jacqueline Winspear

  War, Past, Historical

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• I'm much more conscious of historical events since the '60s. In the '60s, I was insulated by my own addictions, my own lifestyle, from what was going on in the world. After I recovered I was amazed at certain people who had died. I hadn't noticed that they had gone. Not friends ... I'm talking about public figures who had passed away.

  Tennessee Williams

  Talking, Addiction, People

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• The greatest historical events in the twentieth century - in fact, in all of human history - have been the overthrow of capitalism and establishment of societies run by and for the working class in the two great communist revolutions in Russia and China.

  Grover Furr

  Running, Russia, Class

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• If you think about how broadcast mini-series approach historical events, there is a hagiography. There has been a soft, very glossy idea about history. And one of the things I like about Game of Thrones, for example, is just the grit and the authenticity.

  John Landgraf

  Thinking, Games, Ideas

  "FX CEO John Landgraf Talks FARGO Limited Series, THE STRAIN, and More; Says THE STRAIN Will End Up Running Between 39 and 65 Episodes". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. August 2, 2013.

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• Modern man has lost any sense of God's nearness, but Christianity teaches that God reveals himself through every single thing he has ever brought into being, whether a created object or historical event.

  R. C. Sproul

  Men, Historical, Events

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