Quotes on History

Boundary, n. In political geography, an imaginary line between two nations, separating the imaginary rights of one from the imaginary rights of another.

Every situation--nay, every moment--is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.

That's how I make work. Along the way, I take notes, I read about history and popular culture. Sometimes I act out things in the studio. I go back to my mother's hair salon so I can hear three voices going all at once. I pull inspiration from everything.

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form.

At the end of the day, 'Shuffle Along' is about people coming together and making something extraordinary - and history not necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of necessarily being kind to them. It's about the love of doing, regardless of the consequences.

The great nations have always acted like gangsters, and the small nations like prostitutes.

I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history.

Prop 8 did something that no other state in the history of this country has done. It took away the rights of people that already were legally affirmed. Imagine someone putting something on the ballot saying your wedding, your marriage is no longer valid.

I was brought up in a family which valued natural history. Both my parents knew the names of all the British wildflowers, so as we went walking the country, I was constantly being exposed to a natural history sort of knowledge.

The best use of history is as an inoculation against radical expectations, and hence against embittering disappointments.

In war, whichever side may call itself the victor, there are no winners, but all are losers.

The hardest problems of all in law enforcement are those involving a conflict of law and local customs. History has recorded many occasions when the moral sense of a nation produced judicial decisions, such as the 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which required difficult local adjustments.

I feel no need for any other faith than my faith in human beings.

Hindsight is always twenty-twenty.

History is the most dangerous product evolved from the chemistry of the intellect. ...History will justify anything. It teaches precisely nothing, for it contains everything and furnishes examples of everything.

History is the most aristocratic of all literary pursuits, because it obliges the historian to be rich as well as educated.

Criticism should not be querulous and wasting, all knife and root-puller, but guiding, instructive, inspiring, a south wind, not an east wind.

The British soldier can stand up to anything except the British War Office.

Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

History gives you insight of the same quality of truth as poetry or philosophy or a novel.

There never has been a time in our history when work was so abundant or when wages were as high, whether measured by the currency in which they are paid or by their power to supply the necessaries and comforts of life.