Top 100 Social History Quotes
#1. Pirate historians have now discovered social history, the branch of history which in the last two decades or so has been the most dynamic and inventive, in both senses of the word.
Peter Earle
#2. Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic.
Raymond Williams
#3. Political and social history are in my view two aspects of the same process. Social life loses half its interest and political movements lose most of their meaning if they are considered separately.
F. M. Powicke
#4. Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative.
Laurie Graham
#5. The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history.
Simon Schama
#6. The colonial period has been the proving ground in America for the new social history, which concentrates on the ordinary doings of ordinary people rather than on high culture and high politics. Unfortunately ordinary people, almost by definition, leave behind only faint traces of their existence.
Edmund Morgan
#7. Witches is being sold as an account of the Belvoir scandals, but in truth, Tracy Borman has written a thorough and beautifully researched social history of the early 1600s, taking in everything from folk medicine to James I's sex life.
Bella Bathurst
#8. As long as the incomes of the various classes of contemporary society remain beyond the reach of scientific inquiry, there can be no hope of producing a useful economic and social history.
Thomas Piketty
#9. Planned parenthood in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning.
Gunnar Myrdal
#10. I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes.
Emma Donoghue
#11. Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good.
Thomas Sowell
#12. To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
H.G.Wells
#13. Still, though no one is an island, most are peninsulas. Our lives wouldn't make sense without personal memories pinned like butterflies against the velvet backdrop of social history.
Diane Ackerman
#14. Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.
Denise Mina
#15. Nightclub City tells the behind-the-scenes story of Manhattan's glamorous nightlife at its peak. Packed with colorful characters, terrific original research, and an unusually accessible writing style, Nightclub City is a gritty social history of America's most glitzy fantasies.
Debby Applegate
#16. Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.
G. M. Trevelyan
#17. All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out.
A.J.P. Taylor
#18. Social media has taken over in America to such an extreme that to get my own kids to look back a week in their history is a miracle, let alone 100 years.
Steven Spielberg
#19. In economic panics throughout history, the wiping out of the savings accounts of lower earners and the middle class has often led to social revolution, sometimes violent upheavals.
Nick Clooney
#20. Of course the Republicans have long wanted to privatize Social Security and destroy it. But Social Security has been the most important and valuable social program in the history of the United States.
Bernie Sanders
#21. The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future.
Chris Weedon
#23. [Pleasure is what suggested] which behaviors, emotions, social patterns and patterns of taste served us well during our evolutionary history. They were experienced as pleasures and encoded into our formative genetic codes ... deep in the past, from about 100,000 years ago and beyond.
Lionel Tiger
#24. In the pioneer West Whitopias, immigration tended to be the dominant social and racial issue. In Forsyth County, Georgia, immigration is still an issue, but because you have that complicated history of the Trail of Tears and slavery and Jim Crow, the Whitopia has a different flavor.
Richard Benjamin
#25. There's a long history of subsidized philanthropy - particularly in the USA - and again the public has come to expect corporations to play a role in their social welfare. It's become easy for some companies to profit from citizen goodwill and volunteerism.
Ravida Din
#26. Beneath all this he is able to identify as well the dangers of a humanism which shuts out the humane and transcendent horizons and can threaten a new form of the dark night of the soul.
Abdumalik Nysanbayev
#27. Humor, in one form or another, is characteristic of every nation; and reflecting the salient points of social and national life, it illuminates those crowded corners which history leaves obscure.
Agnes Repplier
#28. 'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.
Christopher Hitchens
#29. The only real struggle in the history of the world ... is between the vested interest and social justice.
Arnold Joseph Toynbee
#30. History is preoccupied with fundamental processes of change. If you are allergic to these processes, you abandon history and take cover in the social sciences. Today anthropology, sociology, etc, flourish. History is sick. But then our society too is sick
Edward Hallett Carr
#31. When I'm not writing, I read loads of fiction, but I've been writing quite constantly lately so I've been reading a lot of nonfiction - philosophy, religion, science, history, social or cultural studies.
Irvine Welsh
#32. There was a period when the capitalist system increased the well-being of significant numbers of people as a by-product of seeking out profits for a few, but today the quests for profits comes into sharp conflict with people's demands that their material and social needs should be fulfilled. Pg. 10
Walter Rodney
#33. In The Tricky Art of Co-Existing, Sandi Toksvig navigates life's little dilemmas with wit and not-so-common sense. You'll learn the strange history of common courtesy and the one true secret of social success: how to not drive everyone around you crazy.
William Poundstone
#34. It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's as natural and desirable as -- syphilis...
H.G.Wells
#35. You don't want to be first, right? You want to be second or third. You don't want to be - Facebook is not the first in social media. They're the third, right? Similarly, you know, if you look at Steve Jobs' history, he's never been first.
Malcolm Gladwell
#36. The basis on which the Good Friday agreement was constructed was in addressing those problems in the history of Northern Ireland, the social and constitutional problems as well as the military problems that have been unaddressed for centuries.
John Reid
#37. Remember our proud history of social justice, universal health care, public pensions and making sure no one is left behind. Let's continue to move forward.
Jack Layton
#38. Much of the world today, including the United States, is still living in the social, cultural, and political aftermath of Britain's cultural achievements, its industrial revolution, its government of checks and balances, and its conquests around the world.
Thomas Sowell
#39. At the start of the twenty-first century, the advertising industry is guiding one of history's most massive stealth efforts in social profiling.
Joseph Turow
#40. A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history.
H.G.Wells
#41. History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him.
Hilary Mantel
#42. Looking at my life through the lens of history has made me increasingly grateful to standout women who pushed those boundaries to make the changes from which I have benefited.
Sara Sheridan
#43. What do I want in a good fantasy book? Court politics and social interactions based around houses and cities. Powerful women and devious men. Drama and action with emotional ramifications. Frocks. Kissing. Swords. An intense impression of history in the world-building.
Tansy Rayner Roberts
#44. Social conditions that spur large numbers of people into action are ignored in favor of a Hollywood version of history focusing on one conquering hero. Since a movement for social change is embodied in its leader, death of the leader means death of the movement.
Patricia Hill Collins
#45. The history of inequality is shaped by the way economic, social, and political actors view what is just and what is not, as well as by the relative power of those actors and the collective choices that result. It is the joint product of all relevant actors combined.
Thomas Piketty
#46. The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.
Ernst Junger
#47. Throughout American history many of our social gains and much of our progress toward democracy were made possible by the active intervention of the federal government.
Harold Washington
#48. Every few hundred years in Western history there occurs a sharp transformation. Within a few short decades, society - its worldview, its basic values, its social and political structures, its art, its key institutions - rearranges itself. We are currently living through such a time.
Peter Drucker
#49. [T]he biblical creation story, like the creation stories of other cultures, communicates social and religious values and presents them as if they were universally valid.
Elaine Pagels
#51. My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world's most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely successful on both the religious and secular level.
Michael H. Hart
#52. All history has been a history of class struggles between dominated classes at various stages of social development.
Friedrich Engels
#53. Genres have a history and impose a historical character upon the writer. What is interesting in the poem involves a certain kind of dramatization of the self that you don't have to engage in in the essay. In fact, the essay is a more social medium than the poem.
Vijay Seshadri
#54. The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.
Isaac Asimov
#55. George Stigler Nobel laureate and a leader of Chicago School was asked why there were no Nobel Prizes awarded in the other social sciences, sociology, psychology, history, etc. "Don't worry", Stigler said, "they have already have a Nobel Prize in ... Literature"
Robert Kuttner
#56. As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.
William Gibson
#57. The genuine history of mankind is the history of ideas. It is
ideas that distinguish man from all other beings. Ideas
engender social institutions, political changes, technologi-
cal methods of production, and all that is called economic
conditions.
Ludwig Von Mises
#58. The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.
Albert Memmi
#59. Not only do we naturalize history, but also consequently we naturalize the social phenomena which express our oppression, making change impossible
Monique Wittig
#60. People are reading. In fact, due to social media they are reading more than any time in history. Now we must find a way to get them to include books in all that reading. It starts with us writers doing a better job of writing.
Will Gibson
#61. I'm big into social studies, the humanities. I really love history and world issues and philosophy and law.
Connor Jessup
#62. If the long arc of history bends toward social justice, it also bends toward environmental justice and ecological sanity.
David Jaber
#63. Our modern history begins in 1788 with the dumping of the human detritus of Britain ... Yet repositioned in the sunlight , they flourished. ...This was colonial Australia's great gift to the world: practical proof that, when it comes to human society, the soil is more important than the seed.
Richard Glover
#64. We learn how to kiss, or to drink, talk to our buddies-all the things that you can't really teach in social studies or history-we all learn them at the movies.
Jack Nicholson
#65. We're uncomfortable about considering history as a science. It's classified as a social science, which is considered not quite scientific.
Jared Diamond
#66. Parsons argued that medicine was a social institution that regulated social deviance through the provision of medical diagnoses for nonconforming behavior. Medicine was, in this understanding, engaged in social control.
Sheila Jeffreys
#67. Here's the thing with the costumes for 'Mommy': Given the background and social strata that the characters come from, you can't really imagine that they've gone shopping lately, so we went for that very normcore, fashionless era in history, the early 2000s, which was completely transitional.
Xavier Dolan
#68. The principle that human nature, in its psychological aspects, is nothing more than a product of history and given social relations removes all barriers to coercion and manipulation by the powerful.
Noam Chomsky
#69. For much of American history, the worst classes were seen as extrusions of the worst land: scrubby, barren, and swampy wasteland. Home ownership remains today the measure of social mobility.
Nancy Isenberg
#70. Imagination is always the fabric of social life and the dynamic of history. The influence of real needs and compulsions, of real interests and materials, is indirect because the crowd is never conscious of it.
Simone Weil
#71. Give me one other part of history where everybody shows up to the same social space. Fragmentation is a more natural state of being.
Danah Boyd
#72. We live in a world populated by structures - a complex mixture of geological, biological, social, and linguistic constructions that are nothing but accumulations of materials shaped and hardened by history
Manuel De Landa
#73. Travel now by all means - if you have the time. But travel the right way, the way I travel. I am always reading and thinking of the history and geography of a place. I see its people in terms of these, placed in the social framework of time and space.
Oliver Sacks
#74. the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes.
Lawrence J. Vale
#75. In every domain of art, a work that corresponds to the need of its day carries a message of social and cultural value. It is the artist who crystallizes his age ... who fixes his time in history.
Edgard Varese
#76. Keeping books on social aid is capitalistic nonsense. I just use the money for the poor. I can't stop to count it.
Evita Peron
#77. Guns neither initiated nor enabled larger changes. Economic, political, and social development preceded and laid the foundation for the invention and use of the gun, not the other way around.
Peter A. Lorge
#78. As I review the great history of our nation, community organizers have been at the center of so many of our great social movements.
Cory Booker
#79. To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.
Malebo Sephodi
#80. If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.
Neil Postman
#81. I grew up at a time where I think most people had a social and political conscience. Some of the biggest changes in our country's political history happened at the time I was growing up, so I was raised to be a part of those things and to participate and I will continue to do that as much as I can.
George Clooney
#82. There was no intellectual movement in American history called social Darwinism. The people who were supposedly the leaders of the social Darwinist movement never embraced something called social Darwinism. It didn't exist.
Jonah Goldberg
#83. The most frightening pages of history are those which reveal how easily conditions making a desert of the human spirit may come into existence, with the oozings away of incentive and kindliness in our natural social structure.
Haniel Long
#84. The theory that everyone acts from self-interest, direct or indirect, is psychologically unsound ... Throughout history ... there have been millions of men and women with some sort of Humanist philosophy who have consciously given up their lives for a social ideal.
Corliss Lamont
#85. But Maastricht was not the end of history. It was a first step towards a Europe of growth, of employment, a social Europe. That was the vision of Francois Mitterrand. We are far from that now.
Laurent Fabius
#86. It is the intense spirituality of India, and not any great political structure or social organisation that it has developed, that has enabled it to resist the ravages of time and the accidents of history.
Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan
#87. Do try The House by fresh new author, Susannah Mansfield, it's funny, sad and very different, you'll love the characters and the stories.
Susannah Mansfield
#88. It is not primarily ideas that have a history; it is societies. And then what often seem opposed ideas can in the end be seen as parts of a single social process.
Raymond Williams
#89. Overnight the digital age had changed the course of history for our company. Everything that we thought was in our control no longer was. But within a year we had invested in social media and digital experts. Now Starbucks is the number one brand on Facebook.
Howard Schultz
#90. All right, let's consider some history here. I see a number of girls are wearing pants. This used to be frowned upon. In 1938, Helen Hulick was jailed for wearing slacks -- put behind bars.
Do you think society should have the right to jail or punish you for what you choose to wear?
Svetlana Chmakova
#91. More and more, as I think about history, I am convinced that everything that is worth while in the world has been accomplished by the free, inquiring, critical spirit, and that the preservation of this spirit is more important than any social system whatsoever.
Sinclair Lewis
#92. We do not have to dig deep into history to understand the reality. The examples of Saddam Hussain, who was executed after a sham trial and the case of Muammar Gaddafi, who killed after surrendering in broad daylight, have given enough factual reality to understand the painful truth.
Nilantha Ilangamuwa
#93. As a consequence of the spread of the gospel, history will experience widespread faith in God, righteousness on the personal and social levels, and international peace and prosperity on the cultural and political levels.
Ken Gentry
#94. We as women know that there are no disembodied processes; that all history originates in human flesh; that all oppression is inflicted by the body of one against the body of another; that all social change is built on the bone and muscle, and out of the flesh and blood, of human creators.
Andrea Dworkin
#95. A poem may be an instance of morality, of social conditions, of psychological history; it may instance all its qualities, but never one of them alone, nor any two or three; never less than all.
Allen Tate
#96. Charles Payne suggested that Montgomery was largely a willed phenomenon, a history made by everyday people who were willing to do their spadework, not one shaped entirely by impersonal social forces or great individual leadership.
Troy Jackson
#97. But it is one of these sort of mythologies about America and its intellectual history, that the right embraced this thing called social Darwinism, when it never did so.
Jonah Goldberg
#98. The social and economic impact of innovative American researchers, companies, and workers over the course of U.S. history have been enormous.
Robert Hormats
#99. At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media.
Ramachandra Guha
#100. The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes.
Edward W. Said
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