Cnn2 History Quotes

As writers we intend to make a difference, to alter people's lives for the greater good ... this is why we write, to have an impact on society, to put a personal stamp on history ... Art and literature are the legacies we leave to succeeding generations. We'll be forgotten, but our books and essays, our stories and poems can survive us ... ~ Lee Gutkind

I think that that multiplatform development is what's on the mind of most high-end PC developers now ... this is really the first time in the industry's history that we've had console machines that can handle all that PC developers can deliver. ~ Mike Wilson

Sixty-five years ago [written 2009], in a brief lull between storms in a remarkably stormy June, even by the standards of Channel weather, the heirs of Harold and the kinsmen of the Conqueror came to Normandy. They were supported by the remnants of their first, North American, empire, the two great nations that they had planted in the New World in the time of Good Queen Bess and James 6th and 1st: the Americans, who had rebelled in the name of the rights of Englishmen, and the Canadians, who had stood loyal in the name of the Crown. … The honours of these regiments are ancient and moving: Minden and Malplaquet, Mysore, Badajoz, Waterloo, Inkerman, Gallipoli, the Somme, Imjin. None shines more brightly than Normandy 1944. The paths of glory may lead but to the grave; yet all, even golden boys and girls, must come to dust. It is a better path to the grave than any of the others, not because glory is something to seek, but because, not once or twice in our long island story, the way of duty has been the path to glory; and duty is to be done. …Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us. ~ G.M.W. Wemyss

Why had I chosen the path of the law? And why law of the kind that seemed to be connected to an unspoken family history? 'What haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others,' the psychoanalyst Nicolas Abraham wrote of the relationship between a grandchild and a grandparent. The invitation from Lviv was a chance to explore those haunting gaps. ~ Philippe Sands

History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too? ~ Robert Harris

So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one's chances of being a victim of violence fivefold. ~ Steven Pinker

There were no stars, only the darkness and an arctic chill that had intensified since the first thin, blood-red stripes of sunrise shimmered on the ocean's horizon. ~ P.J. Parker

The Incarnation, which is for traditional Christianity synonymous with the historical birth and earthly life of Christ, is for mystics of a certain type, not only this but also a perpetual Cosmic and personal process. It is an everlasting bringing forth, in the universe and also in the individual ascending soul, of the divine and perfect Life, the pure character of God, of which the one historical life dramatized the essential constituents. Hence the soul, like the physical embryo, resumes in its upward progress the spiritual life-history of the race. "The one secret, the greatest of all," says Patmore, is "the doctrine of the Incarnation, regarded not as an historical event which occurred two thousand years ago, but as an event which is renewed in the body of every one who is in the way to the fulfilment of his original destiny." 239 ~ Evelyn Underhill

The ruinous deeds of the ravaging foe

(Beowulf)

The best-known long text in Old English is the epic poem Beowulf. Beowulf himself is a classic hero, who comes from afar. He has defeated the mortal enemy of the area - the monster Grendel - and has thus made the territory safe for its people. The people and the setting are both Germanic. The poem recalls a shared heroic past, somewhere in the general consciousness of the audience who would hear it.
It starts with a mention of 'olden days', looking back, as many stories do, to an indefinite past ('once upon a time'), in which fact blends with fiction to make the tale. But the hero is a mortal man, and images of foreboding and doom prepare the way for a tragic outcome. He will be betrayed, and civil war will follow. Contrasts between splendour and destruction, success and failure, honour and betrayal, emerge in a story which contains a great many of the elements of future literature. Power, and the battles to achieve and hold on to power, are a main theme of literature in every culture - as is the theme of transience and mortality.
................
Beowulf can be read in many ways: as myth; as territorial history of the Baltic kingdoms in which it is set; as forward-looking reassurance. Questions of history, time and humanity are at the heart of it: it moves between past, present, and hope for the future, and shows its origins in oral tradition. It is full of human speech and sonorous images, ~ Ronald Carter

Certainly it's a rare glimpse into the lives of the Secular Ancients. They don't seem as bad as the Dominion histories make them out to be. Though clearly they were imperfect."
"I don't deny that they were imperfect," Julian said in a distant voice. "I'm not uncritical of the Secular Ancients, Adam. They had all sorts of vices, and they committed one sin for which I can never bring myself to entirely forgive them."
"What sin is that?"
"They evolved into us," he said. ~ Robert Charles Wilson

As an artist, I am interested in telling stories that haven't been told before, stories that are going to affect people, and also stories that shine light on areas of history that haven't had light shined on them before. ~ Naomie Harris

The weather outside certainly was frightful on Jan. 23, 1940, when 8.3 inches fell on the city, the most in Atlanta history, according to the National Weather Service. ~ Anonymous

The truth is, of course, that history is not completed in modern commerce any more than philosophy is perfected in political economy. In other words, there is nothing timeless or God-given about filling stations and penicillin and plastic bags. ~ James Buchan

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality? ~ Philip Zimbardo

The History Of The Universe In Three Words
CHAPTER ONE
Bang!
CHAPTER TWO
sssss
CHAPTER THREE
crunch.
THE END ~ Iain M. Banks

The hypothetical has its charm, but actual government is history. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

The peoples owe all political rights and privileges which we enjoy today in greater or lesser measure, not to the good will of their governments, but to their own strength. One need only study the history of the past three hundred years to understand by what relentless struggles every right has had to be wrested inch by inch from the despots. ~ Rudolf Rocker

A great many people in North America believe that Canada and the United States, in a moment of inexplicable generosity, gave treaty rights to Native people as a gift. Of course, anyone familiar with the history of Indians in North America knows that Native people paid for every treaty right, and in some cases, paid more than once. The idea that either country gave First Nations something for free is horseshit. ~ Thomas King

I remember that throughout history the way of truth and love has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always ... whenever you are in doubt that that is God's way - the way the world is meant to be. Think of that and then try to do His way. ~ Jean Vanier

History shows that an examination of the personal collection of titles in any man's library will provide something of a glimpse into his soul. ~ Andrew Smith

There's the real world, with all its annoying facts and rules. In the real world, there are things that are true and things that aren't. Mostly the real world s-s-s-suh-sucks. But everyone also lives in the world inside their own head. An inscape, a world of thought. In a world made of thought - in an inscape - every idea is a fact. Emotions are as real as gravity. Dreams are as powerful as history. Creative people, like writers, and Henry Rollins, spend a lot of their time hanging out in their thoughtworld. S-s-strong creatives, though, can use a knife to cut the stitches between the two worlds, can bring them together. Your bike. My tiles. Those are our knives. She ~ Joe Hill

Yet in his own estimate, one theme in particular dominated all others: the growing tyranny of the majority, the ever-increasing and most formidable barriers raised by the majority around the free expression of opinion, and, as a result, the frightening oneness of American thinking, the absence of eccentricity and divergence from the norm.

A perfect liberty of the Mind exists in America, said Tocqueville, just as long as the sovereign majority has yet to decide its course. But once the majority has made up its mind, then all contrary thought must cease, and all controversy must be abandoned, not at the risk of death or physical punishment, but rather at the more subtle and more intolerable pain of ostracism, of being shunned by one's fellows, of being rejected by society.

Throughout history kings and princely rulers had sought without success to control human thought, that most elusive and invisible power of all. Yet where absolute monarchs had failed, democracy succeeds, for the strength of the majority is unlimited and all pervasive, and the doctrines of equality and majority rule have substituted for the tyranny of the few over the many the more absolute, imperious and widely accepted tyranny of the many over the few. ~ Richard D. Heffner

The same president who has insisted that core moralism drives him has brought America to its lowest moral standing in history. ~ Glenn Greenwald

The written history of the world is largely a history of warfare, because the states within which we live came into existence largely through conquest, civil strife, or struggles for independence. ~ John Keegan

The Confederate Constitution was almost identical to that of the United States. ~ Bruce Catton

The average person might well be no happier today than in 1800. Even the freedom we value so highly may be working against us. We can choose our spouses, friends and neighbors, but they can choose to leave us. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

Memory is a few lines snipped from a larger story that we are privileged to tuck away between the pages of our minds. ~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

According to Scripture, the invisible church includes everyone who has ever been genuinely born again for every age of church history. This church will not meet in a visible way until Christ returns. The visible church consists of believers who are alive and meeting together right now. ~ Wayne Mack

Shawn Michaels is quite simply the greatest performer in WWE history. ~ Chris Jericho

I just read history books. I read nothing but history books. They have so much to give; I wish I'd majored in history in college. ~ James McBride

The Democrats filibustered something in the Senate when I was eight years old. I don't remember what it was on and I didn't honestly care when I was eight years old. I cared about the history and the Senate rules. ~ Jonathan Krohn

Symbolic rearrangement of the past is of course an unavoidable aspect of all human attempts to make sense of the present. ~ Eamon Duffy

When everyone was falling in and out of love with some random guy they sat next to in history, I never felt swoony or envious. It seemed a waste. Guys, or at least the ones I'd met, didn't seem worth the bother. ~ Eileen Cook

We've been sold a dream of savings and investing that had no basis in any history or reality. We were participants in a vast experiment, a hope that personal finance and investments would do it all for us. We now know that for all too many people, it did not. ~ Helaine Olen

History, as the study of the past, makes the coherence of what happened comprehensible by reducing events to a dramatic pattern and seeming them in a simple form. ~ Johan Huizinga

He is dark as history, origin of the word native: the weight of blood ~ Natasha Trethewey

I am convinced that it is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world. Our involvement in the war in Vietnam has torn up the Geneva Accord. It has strengthened the military-industrial complex; it has strengthened the forces of reaction in our nation. It has put us against the self-determination of a vast majority of the Vietnamese people, and put us in the position of protecting a corrupt regime that is stacked against the poor. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

When Dad pulled up in front of the house, the three of us sat still for a moment and stared at the gloomy pile of bricks my great-aunt called home. Up close, it looked even worse than it had from a distance. Ivy clung to the walls, spreading over windows and doors. A wisteria vine heavy with bunches of purple blossoms twisted around the porch columns. Paint peeled, loose shutters banged in the wind, slates from the roof littered the overgrown lawn.
Charles Addams would have loved it. So would Edgar Allan Poe. But not me. No, sir, definitely not me. Just looking at the place made my skin prickle.
Dad was the first to speak. "This is your ancestral home, Drew," he said, once more doing his best to sound excited. "It was built by your great-great-grandfather way back in 1865, right after the Civil War. Tylers have lived here ever since."
While Dad babbled about family history and finding your roots and things like that, I let my thoughts drift to Camp Tecumseh again. Maybe Martin wasn't so bad after all, maybe he and I could have come to terms this summer, maybe we--
My fantasies were interrupted by Great-aunt Blythe. Flinging the front door open, she came bounding down the steps. The wind ballooned her T-shirt and swirled her gray hair. If she spread her arms, she might fly up into the sky like Mary Poppins. ~ Mary Downing Hahn

This shows that history is not simply a fixed progression towards what is better, but rather an
event of freedom, and even a struggle between freedoms that are in mutual conflict, that is,
according to the well-known expression of St. Augustine, a conflict between two loves: the love of
God to the point of disregarding self, and the love of self to the point of disregarding God. ~ Pope John Paul II

In its history, Europe has committed so many massacres and horrors that it should bow its own head in shame. ~ Desmond Tutu

Far more crucial than what we know or do not know is what we do not want to know. ~ Eric Hoffer

We hold up iPhones and, if we're relatively conscious of history, we point out that this is an amazing device that contains a live map of the world and the biggest libraries imaginable and that it's an absolute paradigm shift in personal communication and empowerment. And then some knob says that it looks like something from Star Trek: The Next Generation, and then someone else says that it doesn't even look as cool as Captain Kirk's communicator in the original and then someone else says no but you can buy a case for it to make it look like one and you're off to the manufactured normalcy races, where nobody wins because everyone goes to fucking sleep. ~ Warren Ellis

Italy still has a provincial sophistication that comes from its long history as a collection of city states. That, combined with a hot climate, means that the Italians occupy their streets and squares with much greater ease than the English. The resultant street life is very rich, even in small towns like Arezzo and Gaiole, fertile ground for the peeping Tom aspect of an actor's preparation. I took many trips to Siena, and was struck by its beauty, but also by the beauty of the Siennese themselves. They are dark, fierce, and aristocratic, very different to the much paler Venetians or Florentines. They have always looked like this, as the paintings of their ancestors testify. I observed the groups of young people, the lounging grace with which they wore their clothes, their sense of always being on show. I walked the streets, they paraded them. It did not matter that I do not speak a word of Italian; I made up stories about them, and took surreptitious photographs. I was in Siena on the final day of the Palio, a lengthy festival ending in a horse race around the main square. Each district is represented by a horse and jockey and a pair of flag-bearers. The day is spent by teams of supporters with drums, banners, and ceremonial horse and rider processing round the town singing a strange chanting song. Outside the Cathedral, watched from a high window by a smiling Cardinal and a group of nuns, with a huge crowd in the Cathedral Square itself, the supporters passed, and to drum r ~ Roger Allam