Quotes on History

Perhaps I am naive, but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.

My personal history, along with the history of many black people in this country, is rife with trauma born out of anti-black policies aided and facilitated by presidents and their administrations.

Peace - the word evokes the simplest and most cherished dream of humanity. Peace is, and has always been, the ultimate human aspiration. And yet our history overwhelmingly shows that while we speak incessantly of peace, our actions tell a very different story.

If at times our actions seem to make life difficult for others, it is only because history has made life difficult for us all.

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action - that the end will sanction any means.

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once!

As one reads history ... one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted.

Man is not logical and his intellectual history is a record of mental reserves and compromises. He hangs on to what he can in his old beliefs even when he is compelled to surrender their logical basis.

The history of astronomy is a history of receding horizons.

I am a typed director. If I made Cinderella, the audience would immediately be looking for a body in the coach.

Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.

If you want to understand today, you have to search yesterday.

All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl.

The thinker makes a great mistake when he asks after cause and effect. They both together make up the indivisible phenomenon.

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.

Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half-imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

Culture, the acquainting ourselves with the best that has been known and said in the world, and thus with the history of the human spirit.

The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.