1607 Us History Quotes

I wrote this book to fill a blind spot in our history, to remind us that outsider amateur game-makers creating personal games have always been here. Since before your Xbox. Since before your PlayStation.

Lest we forget where we come from. Lest we forget what we're capable of. ~ Anna Anthropy

That remains part of the problem - that we don't know the unpleasant aspects of American history...and therefore we don't learn the lesson those chapters have to teach us. So we repeat them over and over again. ~ George Takei

Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times, and hurl in the face of custom and trade and office, the fact which is the upshot of all history, that there is a great responsible Thinker and Actor working wherever a man works; that a true man belongs to no other time or place, but is the centre of things. Where he is, there is nature. He measures you and all men and all events. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old. ~ Lois Lowry

History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they're processes – that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions. ~ John Green

The laws of history tell us that only when the old is gone can the new take its place. ~ Wei Jingsheng

C. S. Lewis observed that almost all crimes of Christian history have come about when religion is confused with politics. Politics, which always runs by the rules of ungrace, allures us to trade away grace for power, a temptation the church has often been unable to resist. ~ Philip Yancey

In South Africa, the atrocities of apartheid have never been taught that way. We weren't taught judgment or shame. We were taught history the way it's taught in America. In America, the history of racism is taught like this: "There was slavery and then there was Jim Crow and then there was Martin Luther King Jr. and now it's done." It was the same for us. "Apartheid was bad. Nelson Mandela was freed. Let's move on. ~ Trevor Noah

Let us cease treating the Evangelists as men on trial whose every word is suspect. When one of them is alone in stating something, certain modern critics who pride themselves on their independence reject his testimony as isolated; when several say the same thing, it seems, we are told, that they must have copied from one another, and their testimony is equally worthless. Were such radical norms applied to profane writers, history could not be written". ~ Ferdinand Prat

What if one of your customers hears us talking about covers and such things?"
"We're in the perfect place to talk of them. They'll assume you're Wiccan. And if you're going to go way back in history and anyone is rude enough to interrupt and ask you about it, like that guy who just left, we'll say we're part of the SCA."
Her brows crinkled in confusion. "The Society for Cruelty to Animals?"
"No, I think you mean the SPCA, where the P stands for Prevention."
"Ah. Of course."
I shot a quick thought to Oberon. 'See? Witches.'
~ Kevin Hearne

It seems to us that there are four great collective sociological assumptions in the modern world. By this we mean not only the Western world, but all the world that shares a modern technology and is structured into nations…. That man's aim in life is happiness, that man is naturally good, that history develops in endless progress, and that everything is matter.
The other great psychological reflection of social reality is the myth. The myth expresses the deep inclinations of a society. Without it, the masses would not cling to a certain civilization, or its process of development and crisis. It is a vigorous impulse, strongly colored, irrational, and charged with all of man's power to believe… In our society the two great fundamentals myths on which all other myths rest are Science and History. And based on them are the collective myths that are man's principal orientations: the myth of Work, the myth of Happiness (which is not the same thing as presupposition of happiness), the myth of the Nation, the myth of Youth, the myth of Hero.
Propaganda is forced to build on those presuppositions and to express these myths, for without them nobody would listen to it. And in so building it must always go in the same direction as society; it can only reinforce society. A propaganda that stresses virtue over happiness and presents man's future as one dominated by austerity and contemplation would have no audience at all. A propaganda that questions progress or work would arou ~ Jacques Ellul

During bull markets, everyone believes that he is committed to stocks for the long term. Unfortunately, history also tells us that during bear markets, you can hardly give stocks away. Most investors are simply not capable of withstanding the vicissitudes of an all-stock investment strategy. The ~ William J. Bernstein

Young people - with their dynamism, their energy and their inherent understanding of our interconnected world - have much to teach us. Increased educational attainment, advances in technology and the spread of information have made this generation the best educated, most connected and most informed in history ~ Kofi Annan

I
lived through beautiful times, Busayna. It was a different age. Cairo
was like Europe. It was clean and smart and the people were well
mannered and respectable and everyone knew his place exactly. I was
different too. I had my station in life, my money, all my friends were of
a certain niveau, I had my special places where I would spend the
evening - the Automobile Club, the Club Muhammad Ali, the Gezira
Club. What times! Every night was filled with laughter and parties and
drinking and singing. There were lots of foreigners in Cairo. Most of
the people living downtown were foreigners, until Abd el Nasser threw
them out in 1956."
"Why did he throw them out?"
"He threw the Jews out first, then the rest of the foreigners got
scared and left. By the way, what's your opinion of Abd el Nasser?"
"I was born after he died. I don't know. Some people say he was a
hero and others say he was a criminal."
"Abd el Nasser was the worst ruler in the whole history of Egypt.
He ruined the country and brought us defeat and poverty. The damage
he did to the Egyptian character will take years to repair. Abd el Nasser
taught the Egyptians to be cowards, opportunists, and hypocrites."
"So why do people love him?"
"Who says people love him?"
"Lots of people that I know love him."
"Anyone who loves Abd el Nasser is either an ignoramus or did
well out of him. The Free Officers wer ~ Alaa Al Aswany

The satyr, as the Dionysiac chorist, dwells in a reality sanctioned by myth and ritual. That tragedy should begin with him, that the Dionysiac wisdom of tragedy should speak through him, is as puzzling a phenomenon as, more generally, the origin of tragedy from the chorus. Perhaps we can gain a starting point for this inquiry by claiming that the satyr, that fictive nature sprite, stands to cultured man in the same relation as Dionysian music does to civilization. Richard Wagner has said of the latter that it is absorbed by music as lamplight by daylight. In the same manner, I believe, the cultured Greek felt himself absorbed into the satyr chorus, and in the next development of Greek tragedy state and society, in fact everything that separates man from man, gave way before an overwhelming sense of unity that led back into the heart of nature. This metaphysical solace (which, I wish to say at once, all true tragedy sends us away) that, despite every phenomenal change, life is at bottom indestructibly joyful and powerful, was expressed most concretely in the chorus of satyrs, nature beings who dwell behind all civilization and preserve their identity through every change of generations and historical movement.

With this chorus the profound Greek, so uniquely susceptible to the subtlest and deepest suffering, who had penetrated the destructive agencies of both nature and history, solaced himself. Though he had been in danger of craving a Buddhistic denial of the will ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

What's really going on here is, this is a media shift. It's comparable to what happened in the 1950s and the birth of electronic mass media back then.This is the birth of a new kind of personal media, where, instead of we're all watching one program, we're all watching each other. And the history of media makes it really clear. Whenever we have a big innovation, the first wave of stuff we do is pretty crummy. The printing press gave us pornography, cheap thrillers, and how-to books. Television gave us Newt Minow's vast wasteland. ~ Esther Dyson

Because of the times we live in, all of us, young and old, do not spend enough time and effort thinking about the meaning of life. We do not look inside ourselves enough to understand our strengths and weaknesses, and we do not look around enough - a the world, in history - to ask the deepest and broadest questions. The solution surely is that, even now, we could all use a little bit more of a liberal education. ~ Fareed Zakaria

On a social level, people have to look after each other, but on an ethical level, each of us has to look after ourselves. If you are a billionaire it is because you have done evil in the world. You have exploited and caused untold misery. You have bent laws and governments to your will. I don't want to shoot him.
I want to strangle him with piano wire. I don't want to escape. I want to be caught and explain my idea to the world. I want to be executed. I now have nothing to lose. We will all be forgotten. But if ten of us manage to kill billionaires those ten will be remembered forever. Our poverty will become history. Wealth is impersonal but we will make it personal again. ~ Jacob Wren

All the lessons of history and experience must be lost upon us if we are content to trust alone to the peculiar advantages we happen to possess. Look, being a lame flunky for a batshit crazy person isn't all that bad. Stay alive long enough and you may sneak your way to Washington! ~ Martin Van Buren

Only then will women be able to talk about what "beauty" really involves: the attention of people we do not know, rewards for things we did not earn, sex from men who reach for us as for a brass ring on a carousel, hostility and scepticism from other women, adolescence extended longer than it ought to be, cruel aging, and a long hard struggle for identity. And we will learn that what is good about "beauty" - the promise of confidence, sexuality, and the self-regard of a healthy individuality - are actually qualities that have nothing to do with "beauty" specifically, but are deserved by and, as the myth is dismantled, available to all women. The best that "beauty" offers belongs to us all by right of femaleness. When we separate "beauty" from sexuality, when we celebrate the individuality of our features and characteristics, women will have access to a pleasure in our bodies that unites us rather than divides us. The beauty myth will be history. ~ Naomi Wolf

Our history consists of the various ways we find to elude the traps that open endlessly before us. ~ Roberto Bolano

It was the fall into history that enslaved us to the labor cycle, to the agricultural cycle. And notice how fiendish it is. ~ Terence McKenna

We are dealing here not with the dogmas of a church, but rather with events that for thousands of years have exercised the most powerful influence in the history of a living people. Jewish children were not taught: 'These are the things we Jews believe in', but 'These are the things that happened to us and made us what we are ~ Eliezer Berkovits

If a quick glance back over world history shows us anything, it shows us that war was one of our most universal joys from our earliest beginnings, savored at every possible opportunity and even some quite incomprehensible ones ... ~ Barbara Holland

There are certain men who are sacrosanct in history; you touch on the truth of them at your peril. These are such men as Socrates and Plato, Pericles and Alexander, Caesar and Augustus, Marcus Aurelius and Trajan, Martel and Charlemagne, Edward the Confessor and William of Falaise, St. Louis and Richard and Tancred, Erasmus and Bacon, Galileo and Newton, Voltaire and Rousseau, Harvey and Darwin, Nelson and Wellington. In America, Penn and Franklin, Jefferson and Jackson and Lee. There are men better than these who are not sacrosanct, who may be challenged freely. But these men may not be. Albert Pike has been elevated to this sacrosanct company, though of course to a minor rank. To challenge his rank is to be overwhelmed by a torrent of abuse, and we challenge him completely.

Looks are important to these elevated. Albert Pike looked like Michelangelo's Moses in contrived frontier costume. Who could distrust that big man with the great beard and flowing hair and godly glance?
If you dislike the man and the type, then he was pompous, empty, provincial and temporal, dishonest, and murderous. But if you like the man and the type, then he was impressive, untrammeled, a man of the right place and moment, flexible or sophisticated, and firm.
These are the two sides of the same handful of coins.
He stole (diverted) Indian funds and used them to bribe doubtful Indian leaders. He ordered massacres of women and children (exemplary punitive operations). He lied ~ R.A. Lafferty

What you're missing is loneliness. All of us are lonely at some point or another, no matter how many people surround us. And then, we meet someone who seems to understand. She smiles, and for a moment the loneliness disappears. Add to that the effects of physical desire - and the excitement you spoke of - and all good sense and judgment fall away." The Rabbi paused, then said, "But love founded only on loneliness and desire will die out before long. A shared history, tradition, and values will link two people more thoroughly than any physical act. ~ Helene Wecker

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. ~ V.S. Naipaul

I write my music with the idea that it will appeal to all of those people, and I want them to go in with all the history that's within all of us - all the things that they've listened to in the backs of their minds, whether it's country music or minimal techno, or classical music or whatever. I want them to bring that excitement, that love, or that hate, or whatever it might be, to my music. I feel that my music draws on so many different things. ~ Missy Mazzoli

As she looked into all the hopeful but weary eyes of the magical community, Brystal was reminded of her final moments with Madame Weatherberry, and she knew exactly what she wanted to say.
"Hello, everyone," she said. "I can only imagine what you've all been through to get here - both in life and on the road. This historic day is possible thanks to a long history of brave men and women making tremendous sacrifices. And although the fight for acceptance and freedom may seem like it's over, our work isn't finished. The world will never be a better place for us until we make it a better place for all. And no matter what challenges await us, no matter whose favor we've yet to earn, we cannot allow anyone's hate to rob us of our compassion or dampen our ambition along the way."
"The truth is," Brystal continued, "there will always be a fight, there will always be bridges to cross and stones to turn, but we must never forfeit our joy to the times we live in. When we surrender our ability to be happy, we become as flawed as the battles we face. And too many lives have already been lost for us to lose sight of what we're fighting for now. So let's honor the people who gave their lives for this moment to happen - let's cherish their memory by living each and every day as freely, as proudly, and as joyfully as they would have wanted us to. Together let's begin a new chapter for our community, so when they tell our story years in the future, the tale of magic has a happy and p ~ Chris Colfer

However this war may end, we have won the war against you; none of you will be left to bear witness, but even if some of you survive, the world would not believe him. There will perhaps be suspicions, discussions, research by historians, but there will be no certainties, because we will destroy the evidence together with you. And even if some proof should remain and some of you survive, people will say that the events you describe are too monstrous to be believed: they will say they are the exaggerations of Allied propaganda and will believe us, who will deny everything, and not you. We will be the ones to dictate the history of the Lagers." -- SS Officer, quoted in The Drowned and the Saved by Primo Levi ~ Robert Harris

Whoever's not with us is against us. That kind of thinking nearly brought an end to history, more than once. This ~ Rick Yancey

This is the only time for high ideals because those ideals are all that we have. We aren't just fighting for our physical survival, but for the survival of our civilization. We don't have the luxury of old-world pillars. We don't have a common heritage, we don't have a millennia of history. All we have are the dreams and promises that bind us together. All we have ... is what we want to be. ~ Max Brooks

It's extraordinary how self-obsessed human beings are. The things that people always go on about is, 'tell us about us', 'tell us about the first human being'. We are so self-obsessed with our own history. There is so much more out there than what connects to us. ~ David Attenborough

Vast migrations of people - some voluntary, most not - have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in human history. As the Earth's climate changes in the coming decades, there are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees. Better places will always call to us. Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us. * ~ Carl Sagan

In fact, the American Mastodon vanished around thirteen thousand years ago. Its demise was part of a wave of disappearances that has come to be known as the megafauna extinction. This wave coincided with the spread of modern humans and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it. In this sense, the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us. ~ Elizabeth Kolbert

Jesus Christ is to me the outstanding personality of all time, all history, both as Son of God and as Son of Man. Everything he ever said or did has value for us today and that is something you can say of no other man, dead or alive. There is no easy middle ground to stroll upon. You either accept Jesus or reject him. ~ Sholem Asch

It's been written that the most sublime figure in American history was George Washington on his knees in the snow at Valley Forge. He personified a people who knew that it was not enough to depend on their own courage and goodness, that they must also seek help from God - their Father and preserver. Where did we begin to lose sight of that noble beginning, of our conviction that standards of right and wrong do exist and must be lived up to? Do we really think that we can have it both ways, that God will protect us in a time of crisis even as we turn away from him in our day-to-day life? ~ Ronald Reagan

And might it not be, continued Austerlitz, that we also have appointments to keep in the past, in what has gone before and is for the most part extinguished, and must go there in search of places and people who have some connection with us on the far side of time, so to speak? ~ W.G. Sebald

In other words, that works of history are mere collections of facts. It is fiction alone that can show us the true nature of human beings ~ Daisaku Ikeda

Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,
the every-day life of each particular time and country. ~ Richard Whately

No matter what happens next, I'm not letting this turn into another two weeks of silence, the entire history of us summed up in a series of near misses and almosts just because neither of us had the snowballs to say anything. ~ Sarah Ockler

By 2025 we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first ever crewed missions beyond the Moon into deep space. So we'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history. By the mid-2030s I believe we can send humans to orbit Mars and return them safely to Earth. And a landing on Mars will follow and I expect to be around in see it. ~ Barack Obama

But the history of science - by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans - teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan

History is what the evidence compels us to believe. ~ Michael Joseph Oakeshott

There will come a moment when the most urgent threats posed by the credit crisis have eased and the larger task before us will be to chart a direction for the economic steps ahead. This will be a dangerous moment. Behind the debates over future policy is a debate over history-a debate over the causes of our current situation. The battle for the past will determine the battle for the present. So it's crucial to get the history straight. ~ Joseph Stiglitz

...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night.
...One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep. ~ Giles MacDonogh

The world had seen the same thing happen many times before. After it happened in Nazi Germany, all the big, powerful countries swore, "Never again!" But here we were, six harmless females huddled in darkness, marked for execution because we were born Tutsi. How had history managed to repeat itself? How had this evil managed to surface once again? Why had the devil been allowed to walk among us unchallenged, poisoning hearts and minds until it was too late? ~ Immaculee Ilibagiza

As another aside, it has occurred to various people, including Robert Graves in his epic novel King Jesus, that poor Judas Iscariot has received a bad deal from history, given that his 'betrayal' was a necessary part of the cosmic plan. The same could be said of Jesus' alleged murderers. If Jesus wanted to be betrayed and then murdered, in order that he could redeem us all, isn't it rather unfair of those who consider themselves redeemed to take it out on Judas and on Jews down the ages? ~ Richard Dawkins

To THOSE who want to lift this nation from the dungheap of history, the past does not matter - only the present, the awareness of the deadening rot which surrounds and suffocates us, and what we must do to vanquish it. ~ F. Sionil Jose