Historical Quotes

I write music, it’s performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn’t need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Memory as an inversion of historical time is the essence of interiority.

The ideal tyranny is that which is ignorantly self-administered by its victims. The most perfect slaves are, therefore, those which blissfully and unawaredly enslave themselves.

One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.

Cleverness is like rouge - liberal application makes a woman look common and desperate. Wit is knowing how to apply it.

The historical development of the work of anthropologists seems to single out clearly a domain of knowledge that heretofore has not been treated by any other science

Unless we announce disasters no one will listen.

History is not another name for the past, as many people imply. It is the name for stories about the past.

Whatever an artist's personal feelings are, as soon as an artist fills a certain area on the canvas or circumscribes it, he becomes historical. He acts from or upon other artists.

I had no idea of the historical evolution of the civilized world's music and had not realized that all modern music owes everything to Bach.

There is no more fascinating subject in which a person may become occupied than an examination into the history of his ancestry.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it. He who accepts evil without protesting against it is really cooperating with it.

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value - zero.

The Bible's historical accuracy is a reminder that while "the heavens declare the glory of God," there's also plenty of evidence among the rubble and ruins.

Thus, our national circulating medium is now at the mercy of loan transactions of banks, which lend, not money, but promises to supply money they do not possess

I don't want a nation of thinkers, I want a nation of workers

Officers don't run, only corporals do that

Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here.

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.

Monarchy degenerates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into savage violence and chaos.

Students of American glass must always keep in mind that the creations they collect are truly examples of our American culture... and thus have historical significance.

We do not want to lead or be led. We want to be free.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

Tyranny naturally arises out of democracy.

Historical analogy is the last refuge of people who can't grasp the current situation.

What distinguishes the historian from the collector of historical facts is generalization.

I want to fill every part of you, breathe the air from your lungs and leave my handprints on your soul. I want to give you more pleasure than you can bear.

We have a lot of sort of received historical ways of viewing portraiture. And I suppose in some way I'm sort of questioning that by toying with the rules of the game.

We must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.

History will never accept difficulties as an excuse.

It is only by historical analysis that we can discover what makes up man, since it is only in the course of history that he is formed.

Historical experience is written in blood and iron.

We are not capable of producing a concept of time that is at once cosmological, biological, historical and individual

We will never make a 32-bit operating system.

The prolonged slavery of woman is the darkest page in human history.

Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators.

History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.

The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight-of-hand that was ever invented.

Sisterhood cannot be assumed on the basis of gender; it must be forged in concrete historical and political practice and analysis

One never really knows how much one has been touched by a place until one has left it.

A newspaper has three things to do. One is to amuse, another is to entertain and the rest is to mislead.

I have Tom Ford, Gucci, Saint Laurent, McQueen, and odd pieces that Ive just acquired because I happened to have come across them and felt they have some historical resonance.

Christ ought to be preached with this goal in mind--that we might be moved to faith in him so that he is not just a distant historical figure but actually Christ for you and me.

You can't write the same book twice. Though I've been in historical musical situations, I can't go back and do that again. And though I run into artistic crises, they keep my life interesting.

If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable

Historical novels are, without question, the best way of teaching history, for they offer the human stories behind the events and leave the reader with a desire to know more.

People perish. Books are immortal.

A book is a wonderful present. Though it may grow worn, it will never grow old.

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

The idea that the Crusades and the fight of Christendom against Islam is somehow an aggression on our part is absolutely anti-historical.