Us Historical Quotes

#1. And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

Robert Penn Warren

#2. Our lover is the sun, and we the stars forever floating in their glow. We push and push, yearning for our sun's rays to reach out and touch us for just a moment in time ... one second-glance to warm our spirits and soothe our aching hearts.

Katlyn Charlesworth

#3. Of course, even though Peter and I have had our disagreements, we share a bond I'd defend to the death if needs be. If all goes according to the natural order of things, siblings will know us longer than our parents, longer than our spouses and friends. Lord Westdale to Duncan

Kieran Kramer

#4. Jane reminds us that God is in his heaven, the monarch on his throne and the pelvis firmly beneath the ribcage. Apparently rock and roll liberated the pelvis and it hasn't been the same since.

Emma Thompson

#5. Our house has its back to the sea,' writes Hester in her journal. 'Below us, the ocean spreads to the sky, twitching wide and blue and hungry. One would think it to be infinite. But we, of course, know better.

Tanya Moir

#6. 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

#7. The question 'Why white kids love hip-hop?' forces us immediately to deal with the historical weight of race in America. On the surface people see hip-hop and race as nothing new. I think the ways young white Americans are engaging hip-hop suggest something more.

Bakari Kitwana

#8. We may be finished with the past but the past is not finished with us.

Donald Riggio

#9. The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews.

Geza Vermes

#10. Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.

Barry Unsworth

#11. It [the depression] was not accidental. It was a carefully contrived occurrence worked out as one works out a mathematical equation. The international bankers sought to bring about a condition of despair here so that they might emerge as the rulers of us all.

Louis Thomas McFadden

#12. I think you just have to turn it around and say we are at this absolute historical moment. No generation has ever been as powerful as us. We have the future of our species in our hands. We could be the generation that people look back on and say, 'They bloody did it!', not 'They didn't bother.'

Franny Armstrong

#13. The doctrine of "exit strategy" fundamentally misunderstands the nature of war and, more generally, the nature of historical action. for the knowledge of the end is not given to us at the beginning.

Leon Wieseltier

#14. If your like a powerful modern thriller with an historical core in the Scandinavian style of many separate threads which eventually come together, Purple Killing will grip you. It is my latest book and a companion to Hitler's First Lady, but in a very different style. Set equally in the US and UK.

Malcolm Blair-Robinson

#15. I remember a period where my publisher said to me, 'Look, your historical work is selling much better than your contemporary work, so please give us more historicals.'

Emma Donoghue

#16. The other Clans will soon arrive. The greatest times of our family are before us. And so are the darkest.

P.J. Parker

#17. History tells us what people do; historical fiction helps us imagine how they felt.

Guy Vanderhaeghe

#18. Our historical experience teaches us that men imitate one another, that their attitudes are statistically calculable, their opinions manipulable, and that man is therefore less an individual (a subject) than an element in a mass.

Milan Kundera

#19. William made an ejaculation in his own language that I didn't understand, nor did the abbot understand it, and perhaps it was best for us both, because the word William uttered had an obscene hissing sound.

Umberto Eco

#20. But now, here were the British among us, upon our soil where the sun rises over one lake and sets upon another.

Dee Farrell

#21. But, you know, there's another group that really runs the show. It's very shadowy, just as you've described ... Those of us in the Congress of the United States are window dressing.

Virgil Goode

#22. Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

Lin Yutang

#23. There are reveries so deep, reveries which help us descend so deeply within ourselves that they rid us of our history. They liberate us from our name. These solitudes of today return us to the original solitudes.

Gaston Bachelard

#24. As far as benefits to reading historical novels, there are several! For one thing, you learn about life in another era. Secondly, these novels help us to develop a deeper understanding of the legacy of women who came before us and the strides made by our ancestors.

Mary Pope Osborne

#25. Europeans are forever the offspring of Machiavelli, trapped in a historical rollercoaster that can bring us a monarchy-toppling French Revolution and then a few years later Napoleon Bonaparte as emperor.

Loretta Napoleoni

#26. History cannot teach us any general rule, principle, or law. There is no means to abstract from a historical experience a posteriori any theories or theorems concerning human conduct and policies. The

Ludwig Von Mises

#27. History shows us a window into our past. Historical fiction can take us by the and and lead us into that world.

Judith Geary

#28. Sea and land may lie between us, but my heart is always there with you.

Nancy B. Brewer

#29. 'Memory.' 'Race.' 'Murder.' That's what they say about me. I am an elegiac poet. I have some historical questions, and I'm grappling with ways to make sense of history; why it still haunts us in our most intimate relationships with each other, but also in our political decisions.

Natasha Trethewey

#30. I was asked the other day in which era I would choose to live. As a historical novelist, it comes up sometimes. As a woman I'd have to say I'd like to live in the future - I want to see where these centuries of change are leading us.

Sara Sheridan

#31. The dark shadow we seem to see in the distance is not really a mountain ahead, but the shadow of the mountain behind - a shadow from the past thrown forward into our future. It is a dark sludge of historical sectarianism. We can leave it behind us if we wish.

David Trimble

#32. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, in the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.

John Green

#33. Swedes, we are not - Russians, we do not want to become ... so let us be Finnish.

Adolf Ivar Arwidsson

#34. I have the most profound respect for the Department of Justice and the FTC. We in Europe are a younger and I would say junior institution to the historical antitrust experience of the US.

Mario Monti

#35. Fable is more historical than fact, because fact tells us about one man and fable tells us about a million men.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

#36. I have found that those who try to shield us from the truth, regardless of the reason, end up doing the greatest harm. Truth alone sets you free, not lies and omissions.

Jessica Dotta

#37. The dominion which the banking institutions have obtained over the minds of our citizens ... must be broken, or it will break us.

Thomas Jefferson

#38. History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.

Jodi Picoult

#39. Valentine reminds us that to be fully human is to be both a story teller and a story dweller."
--- Christina Meldrum, author of Madapple and Amaryllis in Blueberry

Tamara Valentine

#40. For the Jew, Passover is a sign of salvation, of "God with us" at a particular historical moment in the past. For the Christian, Easter is a sign of "God with us" in the past, but with us now also and at a time to come, as well.

Joan D. Chittister

#41. Nothing will stop us. The road to the stars is steep and dangerous. But we're not afraid ... Space flights can't be stopped. This isn't the work of one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.

Yuri Gagarin

#42. The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.

Mary McCarthy

#43. Yes, my boy, you are indeed much faster, bigger, and stronger than me and an altogether superior speciman of God's creation, but I have seen your like before. Only one of us can be master, and it won't be you.

Emery Lee

#44. It is best to erase all personal history because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people

Carlos Castaneda

#45. The historical novel gives us perspective on our modern lives and helps us connect with the story, which we are continuing ourselves.

Mary Pope Osborne

#46. Presented memorial to [Constitutional Convention] committee on sufferage. Was very courteously treated. We all felt it a great day in the history of Utah. The committee informed us they had passed on W[oman] S[uffrage] being ten to five in favor.

Ruth May Fox

#47. Six wives the King's had now.' Barak's words dragged me from my reverie. 'We can't even get one between us.

C.J. Sansom

#48. We want to overcome our historical problems with Chile. The sea has divided us and the sea must bring us back together again. Chile has agreed, for the first time, to talk about sea access for Bolivia.

Evo Morales

#49. Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.

Neil Postman

#50. Watergate got us to think of leaders as mere mortals. America began to think of itself in a very different way - I would say a salutary way - and Reagan was most important in shifting the grand dynamic thrust of the American historical process by ending that.

Rick Perlstein

#51. It seems ironic to suggest that some of us may be called to build community in our churches, for the church as it was meant to be is a historical archetype of community.

Parker J. Palmer

#52. Nobody hates us as ourselves. In their minds we're not human ... They don't hate us because we did something or said something. They make us stand for an evil they invent and then they want to kill it in us.

Marge Piercy

#53. I am a survivor. But I am not unique of the people that survived the great late war. We all have our stories to tell. But for most of us the hardened corners have soften with the passage of time.

Nancy B. Brewer

#54. For us, universal values such as justice, morality and peace cannot be disputed and it is for this reason that we pursue the restoration of historical truth.

Robert Kocharian

#55. In all the areas within which the spiritual life of humanity is at work, the historical epoch wherein fate has placed us is an epoch of stupendous happenings.

Edmund Husserl

#56. In Bolivia, we want to overcome our historical problems with Chile. The sea has divided us and the sea must bring us back together again.

Evo Morales

#57. ...You, you look -- bien -- exactly what you were, a high-ranking British officer, used to unwavering obedience and with the air of a Greek god, gazing down on us mere mortals.

Marguerite Kaye

#58. Selene's life is a lesson to us that the trajectory of women's equality hasn't always been a forward march. In some ways the ancients were more advanced than we are today; there have been setbacks before and may be more in the future.

Stephanie Dray

#59. The chief practical use of history is to deliver us from plausible historical analogies.

James Bryce

#60. A historical perspective can also help free us from the ever-present danger
especially at danger in the social sciences
of absolutizing a theory or method which is actually relative to the fact that we live at a given moment in time in the development of our particular culture.

Rollo May

#61. Remember, morality is God's standard, not humankind's standard. So it is important that we understand the process that God used to bring us his wisdom, truth and historical perspective.

Reid A. Ashbaucher

#62. When we are reading, a voice comes to us as in the dark and whispers, "Imagine!" Samuel Beckett
as told by Bill Moyer in the Foreword he wrote for, The Public Library: A Photographic Essay by Robert Dawson. Afterword by Ann Patchett

Samuel Beckett

#63. Any friend of my cousin's is a friend of mine, sir. How exactly do you know Lady Zoe?"
Before Tristan could answer, Zoe jumped in. "We met at some party, did we not, Mr. Bonnaud?"
"Yes." Tristan forced a smile. "Clearly a very dull one, since neither of us can remember which one it was.

Sabrina Jeffries

#64. I've fallen in love with you. I love you even now when you sit before me with the eyes of a wolf. So take pity upon the fool I have become. I forgot it was only a bargain between us.

Ronda Thompson

#65. Roger Williams died sometime during the early months of 1683. Some of what he said and wrote during his lifetime belongs to the seventeenth century. But much of his historical and philosophical record speaks to us across the centuries.

Alan E. Johnson

#66. Where there's life, there's learning, and the truth is always calling us out of our pride. If we don't harken, it will call louder, and throw a situation at us. A pebble at first. If we still don't listen, we'll get a stone. Then a rock. Then a great crashing boulder. We must learn, or die.

Orna Ross

#67. You may be surprised what we use our dreams to do, how we drape them over our sight and carry them like amulets to protect us from evil spells.

Edwidge Danticat

#68. You want a sermon? Jesus died and resurrected and then run off to Heaven to leave us sinners here. Amen.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

#69. Yet, the quest for knowledge will overcome us and we must know. And, at last, we must see where the road ends, even if it be the cliff.

Nancy B. Brewer

#70. 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

#71. Today's connoisseurs of Sino-American relations seem to view the relationship through a dystopian prism; their gloomy commentaries are largely an assemblage of snapshots on contemporary interactions or day-to-day developments without a historical context.

Patrick Mendis

#72. Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view

Arthur Koestler

#73. What one of us wants we all want. You a man of the earth as you are, you ought to have known we hunt in packs. And now I come to finish you.

Samuel Snoek-Brown

#74. It wilna end wi' me, Campbell. Slay me, and you'll face my brothers and after them my Muhheconneok kin. You cannae possibly kill us all.

Pamela Clare

#75. The British could leave and half India wouldn't notice us leaving just as they didn't notice us arriving. All our reforms of administration might be reforms on the moon for all it has to do with them..

J.G. Farrell

#76. Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Tom Hulce

#77. I took my friend's hand as she helped me up. With our hands still linked and our flower crowns tangled in our hair, we danced, laughing with joy, through the rain and towards the school, the lightning showing us our path with its powerful light.

Erica Sehyun Song

#78. Americans must outgrow the unbecoming arrogance that leads us to assert that America somehow owns a monopoly on goodness and truth - a belief that leads some to view the world as but a stage on which to play out the great historical drama: the United States of America versus the Powers of Evil.

Feisal Abdul Rauf

#79. It's the accursed inventions of the age that are ruining everything - the artillery, the muskets, the cannons, and above all the printing press, that scourge brought from Germany. No more manuscripts, no more books. Printing is ruining bookselling. The end of the world is upon us.

Victor Hugo

#80. It has become increasingly necessary to abandon the use of biblical historiography as a viable source for our own historical writing .. We must be ready to radically alter and consciously distance ourselves from all presuppositions that have been imposed on us by the biblical account.

Frank Charles Thompson

#81. I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

Jefferson Davis

#82. What does our great historical hunger signify, our clutching about us of countless cultures, our consuming desire for knowledge, if not the loss of myth, of a mythic home, the mythic womb?

Friedrich Nietzsche

#83. We live in an era with no historical precedents. History is no longer useful as a tool in helping us understand current changes.

Douglas Coupland

#84. I regard Christianity neither as an inclusive divine revelation nor as an historical phenomenon, but as a teaching which-gives us the meaning of life.

Leo Tolstoy

#85. Historical novels, in particular, allow us to relive the past without the neatness of history, and with all the complexity of the present.

Laila Lalami

#86. The problem of forgetting might not torment us so much if we could only convince ourselves that remembering isn't important. Perhaps the things we learn - words, dates, formulas, historical and biographical details - don't really matter. Facts can be looked up. That's what the Internet is for.

Gary Wolf

#87. For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.

Adolf Hitler

#88. The next step will be for the colonists on Mars to throw off the hand of the United States. There will be this wonderful historical irony. When the people on Mars write a declaration of independence saying, 'We hold these truths to be self-evident ... ', the US will be rather pissed off

Eric Idle

#89. I refuse to believe the people of Texas and all Americans in the world have forgotten us.

P.J. Parker

#90. Anyone young, famous and beautiful who dies young is forever frozen in time and fascinating to all of us.

Deb Stratas

#91. What blinds us, or what makes historical progress very difficult, is our lack of awareness of our ignorance.

Terence McKenna

#92. [ ... ] That is why we are here today, because we have had the strength within us to survive, a flame inside of us that have not gone out. We are still human, not dust, like millions of others, and we will continue to be, no matter what adversity we face.

Liv-Christine Hoem

#93. The Society for the Protection of Historical Buildings was the official body whose task it was to oversee repairs and maintenance to our beloved but battered listed building. We had them on speed-dial. They had us on their black list.

Jodi Taylor

#94. For me, it's always difficult when a historical film claims to depict or represent a reality that none of us can know, that is always different. It's always the case. We never know what happened then.

Michael Haneke

#95. I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.

David Levering Lewis

#96. True vice, my lady, would frighten us all, if it did not wear the mask of virtue. (p.56)

Emery Lee

#97. Words had failed us that night, and I'd welcomed the silence. Words had escaped me the next morning as well but in a different way, when I came to realize that I was married to a fisherman for the rest of my days."--Abigail Whimble, Return to the Outer Banks House

Diann Ducharme

#98. Jesus is an historical figure for me, and he's also a bridge between God and man, in the Christian faith, and one that I think is powerful precisely because he serves as that means of us reaching something higher.

Barack Obama

#99. All the many brands of suppression - racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, classism - are historical; they have not been always with us. It was not ever thus. And it's not going to be this way, come the revolution!

Clara Fraser

#100. In the U.S., diversity is a politically correct slogan. In India, it is a historical fact. Much as we in the West may resent it, India has a lot to teach us when it comes to religious tolerance.

Gary Weiss