Historical Quotes - Page 25

• Actually, the only thing I regret is not making more underground films and bringing them with me as historical documents.

  Bahman Ghobadi

  Regret, Film, Documents

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• No historical analogies are exactly precise.

  Rick Perlstein

  Analogies, Precise

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• When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.

  A. J. P. Taylor

  Loyalty, Mistake, Writing

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• The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us.

  James Russell Lowell

  Thinking, Past, Depth

  James Russell Lowell (1871). “My Study Windows”, p.109

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• The highest historical probability can be adduced in support of the proposition that, if it were possible to annihilate the Bible, and with it all its influences, we should destroy with it the whole spiritual system of the moral world.

  Edward Everett

  Faith, Spiritual, Support

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• The Bible writers didn't care that they were bunching together sequences some of which were historical, some preposterous, and some downright manipulative. Faithful recording was not their business; faith was.

  Jeanette Winterson

  Bible, Faith, Together

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• Rome is the city above all cities which loses most of its meaning to those who do not bring to it some historical sense, a decent knowledge of art, and a good amount of time. Rome therefore is particularly disturbing to an American.

  Clare Boothe Luce

  Art, Rome, Cities

  Clare Boothe Luce (1941). “European spring”

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• Historical investigation and literary criticism have taken the magic out of the Bible and have made it a composite human book, written by many hands in different ages.

  Bill Vaughan

  Bible, Book, Taken

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• it is not the inferiority of women that has caused their historical insignificance; it is rather their historical insignificance that has doomed them to inferiority.

  Simone de Beauvoir

  Women, History, Inferiority

  Simone de Beauvoir (1953). “The second sex”, Vintage

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• As a society in turmoil, we are going to see more, and more various, attempts to simulate order through repression; and art is a historical target for such efforts.

  Adrienne Rich

  Art, Order, Effort

  Adrienne Rich (2003). “What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics (Expanded Edition)”, p.133, W. W. Norton & Company

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• I do believe that in every age there are people whose consciousness transcends their own time and that these people, whether fictional or historical, are those with whom we most closely identify and those about whom we most enjoy reading.

  Erica Jong

  Believe, Reading, People

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• I always wanted to be historical, from almost a baby on, I felt that way about it.

  Gertrude Stein

  Baby, Ambition, Way

  Gertrude Stein (2012). “Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein”, p.7, Vintage

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• A peculiarity of the American historical sensibility allows us to be proud of great-grandfathers (or even grandfathers) who lived in crushing poverty, while the poverty of a father is too close for comfort.

  Patricia Hampl

  Crush, Father, Comfort

  Patricia Hampl (1993). “Spillville: A Collaboration”, Milkweed Editions

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• We only store in memory images of value. To write about one's life is to live it twice, and the second time is both spiritual and historical.

  Patricia Hampl

  Spiritual, Memories, Writing

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• Our dreams of bringing the whole of human history under the control of the human will are ironically refuted by the fact that no group of idealists can easily move the pattern of history toward the desired goal of peace and justice. The recalcitrant forces in the historical drama have a power and persistence beyond our reckoning.

  Reinhold Niebuhr

  Dream, Drama, Moving

  Reinhold Niebuhr (2015). “Reinhold Niebuhr: Major Works on Religion and Politics: (Library of America #263)”, p.551, Library of America

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• before one actually visits them, everyone tends to think of their favorite countries as one grand Disneyland filled with national monuments and historical treasures conveniently laid out for easy viewing, when what they really are filled with, of course, is people going to work, laundromats and places to buy rat poison.

  Bette Midler

  Country, Travel, Thinking

  Bette Midler (2014). “A View from A Broad”, p.54, Simon and Schuster

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• There are filmmakers like me in different parts of the world that have a story they want to tell, and it's a story that comes out of a certain historical reality within their own life. Then you get committed all the way and however long it takes, stay very committed.

  Haile Gerima

  Reality, Long, Different

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.

  Theodor Adorno

  Might, Wealth, Late

  Theodor Adorno, Richard Leppert, Susan H. Gillespie (2002). “Essays on Music”, p.148, Univ of California Press

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• A woman's biography - with about eight famous historical exceptions - so often turns out to be the story of a man and the woman who helped his career.

  Catherine Drinker Bowen

  Women, Eight, Careers

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• historical research of the truly scholastic kind is not connected with human beings at all. It is a pure study, like higher mathematics.

  C. V. Wedgwood

  History, Research, Study

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• we have accumulated a wealth of historical experience which confirms our belief that the scales of American justice are out of balance.

  Angela Davis

  Justice, Balance, United States

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• The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

  Paul de Man

  War, Historical Knowledge, Revolution

  Paul de Man (2013). “Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism”, p.165, Routledge

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• In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

  George Grosz

  Art, Age, Care

  George Grosz, Heartfield, Wieland Herzfelde (1987). “Art Is in Danger”

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• [My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'

  Robert Anton Wilson

  Feet, Eight, Historical Novels

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• In these days the invention of printing, and the diffusion of knowledge, render historical calumnies a little less dangerous: truth will always prevail in the long run, but how slow its progress!

  Napoleon Bonaparte

  Running, Long, Progress

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