Historical Quotes - Page 24

• Since many people have been asking me to elaborate on why I think "Inglourious Basterds" is akin to Holocaust denial, I'll try to explain what I mean as succinctly as possible, by paraphrasing Roland Barthes: anything that makes Fascism unreal is wrong. For me, "Inglourious Basterds" makes the Holocaust harder, not easier to grasp -- as a historical reality, I mean, not as a movie convention. Insofar as it becomes a movie convention, it loses its historical reality.

  Jonathan Rosenbaum

  Mean, Reality, Thinking

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• Rama is a fairly common name in India. It symbolizes an individual who is interested both in enlightenment and martial arts. I do not claim to have any past life connection with the historical Rama. It's just a name I liked.

  Frederick Lenz

  Art, Past, Names

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• Like sex, poverty and power, suicide may always be with us. But like them again, the actual form is takes is essentially time-specific and culture-bound, not only in the past but in the present too. The people who took their lives, the paths which led them to that end, and the experience of dying in this way were deeply influenced by specific historical circumstances. Only by making a greater effort at historical understanding can this most secret house of death be made to yield up more of its confidences.

  David Cannadine

  Suicide, Sex, Past

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• It's a great historical joke that when the Spanish met the Aztecs, it was a blind date made in serve-you-right heaven. At the time, they were the two most unpleasant cultures in the entire world, and richly deserved each other. Still, the story of how stout Cortes blustered, bullied and bludgeoned his way to collapsing an entire empire with a handful of contagious hoodlums is astonishing.

  A. A. Gill

  Two, History, Heaven

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• With their own record of killing 12 million American Indians and supporting slavery for four decades after the British abolished it, Americans wish to project their historical guilt on to someone else.

  Andrew Roberts

  History, Guilt, Wish

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• On several occasions, we are informed that the professional ideal 'took steps', 'organised assaults', and 'selected social problems'. But this is anthropomorphic metaphor implausibly masquerading as historical explanation.

  David Cannadine

  Book, Steps, Language

  David Cannadine (1998). “History in Our Time”, Penguin Group USA

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• Contemporary audiences, other than those making a deliberate historical leap, would find, say, the 1931 'Dracula' impossibly slow.

  Andrew Tudor

  Hollywood, Film, Leap

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• The constructs of the mathematical mind are at the same time free and necessary. The individual mathematician feels free to define his notions and set up his axioms as he pleases. But the question is will he get his fellow mathematician interested in the constructs of his imagination. We cannot help the feeling that certain mathematical structures which have evolved through the combined efforts of the mathematical community bear the stamp of a necessity not affected by the accidents of their historical birth.

  Hermann Weyl

  Math, Imagination, Effort

  Hermann Weyl (1968). “Gesammelte Abhandlungen”

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• Well, for me, really, I think it was I wanted to try and clear up some of the misperceptions that were out there and fill in some of the historical gaps.

  Monica Lewinsky

  Thinking, Trying, Gaps

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• One belief, more than any other, is responsible for the slaughter of individuals on the alter of the great historical ideas - justice or progress or happiness of future generations... or emancipation of a nation or race or class... this is the belief that somewhere... there is a final solution.

  Isaiah Berlin

  Race, Class, Ideas

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• It seems the height of antiquated hubris to claim that the universe carried on as it did for billions of years in order to form a comfortable abode for us. Chance and historical contingency give the world of life most of its glory and fascination. I sit here happy to be alive and sure that some reason must exist for "why me?" Or the earth might have been totally covered with water, and an octopus might now be telling its children why the eight-legged God of all things had made such a perfect world for cephalopods.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Children, Octopus, Eight

  Stephen Jay Gould (2010). “An Urchin in the Storm: Essays about Books and Ideas”, p.206, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Consensual paranoia - the pathology of the normal person who is a member of a war-justifying society - forms the template from which all the images of the enemy are created. By studying the logic of paranoia, we can see why certain archetypes of the enemy must necessarily recur, no matter what the historical circumstances.

  Sam Keen

  War, Enemy, Atheism

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• The distrust and suspicion which men everywhere evidence toward their adversaries, at all states of historical development, may be regarded as the immediate precursor to the notion of ideology.

  Karl Mannheim

  Men, Atheism, May

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• Today's Politically Correct "historical Jesuses" are no different, being mere clones of the scholars who design them.

  Robert M. Price

  Jesus, Design, Atheism

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• It is quite likely ... that the central figure of the gospels is not based on any historical individual. Put simply, not only is the theological "Christ of faith" a synthetic construct of theologians, a symbolic "Uncle Sam" figure, but if you could travel ... back to First-Century Nazareth, you would not find a Jesus living there.

  Robert M. Price

  Jesus, Uncles, Atheism

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• There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Jesus, Giving, Heaven

  Albert Schweitzer (2010). “The Quest of the Historical Jesus”, p.396, Lulu.com

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• The study of the Life of Jesus has had a curious history. It set out in quest of the historical Jesus, believing that when it had found Him it could bring Him straight into our time as a Teacher and Saviour. ... But He does not stay; He passes by our time and returns to His own... He returned to His own time, not owing to the application of any historical ingenuity, but by the same inevitable necessity by which the liberated pendulum returns to its original position.

  Albert Schweitzer

  Teacher, Jesus, Believe

  "The Quest of the Historical Jesus". Book by Albert Schweitzer, transl. by W. Montgomery, 1906.

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• We have the Annunciation, the Conception, the Birth and the Adoration, as described in the first and second chapters of Luke's gospel; and as we have historical assurance that the chapters in Matthew's gospel which contain the miraculous birth are an after addition not in the earliest manuscripts, it seems probable that these two poetical chapters in Luke may also be unhistorical, and borrowed from the Egyptian accounts of the miraculous births of their kings.

  Samuel Sharpe

  Kings, Two, Atheism

  Samuel Sharpe (1863). “Egyptian mythology and Egyptian Christianity, with their influence on the opinions of modern Christendom”, p.19

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• If there be a mind that, not perceiving in the narratives we have compared the fingermarks of tradition, and hence the legendary character of these evangelical anecdotes, still leans to the historical interpretation, whether natural or supernatural; that mind must be alike ignorant of the true character both of legend and of history, of the natural and the supernatural.

  David Friedrich Strauss

  Character, Ignorant, Mind

  David Friedrich Strauss, George Eliot (1860). “The life of Jesus critically examined”, p.339

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• It is wiser, I believe, to arrive at theory by way of evidence rather than the other way around.... It is more rewarding, in any case, to assemble the facts first and, in the process of arranging them in narrative form, to discover a theory or a historical generalization emerging of its own accord.

  Barbara Tuchman

  Believe, Atheism, Narrative

  Barbara W. Tuchman (2011). “Practicing History: Selected Essays”, p.34, Random House

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• I put the truth out there, I put the historical facts into Hip Hop to show us how much history repeats itself and that if we truly want to evolve as a human race, we need to stop sticking each other in ridiculous categories.

  Immortal Technique

  Race, Hip Hop, Want

  "The Transcendence of Hip Hop - An Interview with Immortal Technique". Interview with Chris Grosso, theindiespiritualist.com. February 20, 2014.

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• I am a political animal, because for God's sakes I think "We The People" is a job. I think experienced self government demands on all levels - intellectual, moral, historical, and spiritual level. We are supposed to be engaged and give directions to our elected employees.

  Ted Nugent

  Spiritual, Jobs, Animal

  "More Than 10 Questions with Ted Nugent. The Man, His Views, His Music & The New Album ShutUp & Jam". Interview with Mark Capuano, music.allaccess.com. July 23, 2014.

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• We are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual

  Paul Ricoeur

  Individual, Concept Of Time, Concepts

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• Christian scholars often say that Sufi theories are close to those of Christianity. Many Moslems maintain that they are essentially derived from Islam. The resemblance of many Sufi ideas to those of several religious and esoteric systems are sometimes taken as evidence of derivation. The Islamic interpretation is that religion is of one origin, differences being due to local or historical causes.

  Idries Shah

  Christian, Religious, Taken

  Idries Shah (1974). “The Elephant in the Dark”, p.6, Octagon Press Ltd

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• One of the things I like about doing historical films is drawing the line between now and then.

  James Purefoy

  Drawing, Lines, Film

  "Exclusive: James Purefoy Talks IRONCLAD and JOHN CARTER". Interview with Christina Radish, collider.com. July 2, 2011.

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