Historical Restorations Quotes

He wrapped her hair around his fist, tilted her head back, and kissed her. Hard. She moaned into him, and he pulled away.
"Possessive much?" she asked on a laugh.
"Just making sure these hooligans know you're mine."
Her brow rose. "Really? Yours? Talk about caveman."
"I'm a Gallagher, baby, I'm as caveman as they come. ~ Carrie Ann Ryan

Such was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude." Dieneces, not at all frightened at these words, but making light of the Median numbers, answered "Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade. ~ Herodotus

Lady's mouth tasted like blood and iron all the time now. It tasted like defeat. ~ Kiersten White

Antanas eased up on the accelerator and pulled the truck onto the shoulder. The sound of the soldiers' footsteps crunching in the snow made Maria sit up straight. The truck had driven about thirty metres past the patrol, but none of the soldiers had fired upon them. Antanas hoped fervently that the transport documents that Peter had furnished him would pass inspection. Maria reached down and touched a metal pipe concealed beneath her seat. She was prepared to use it.

Jadwyga continued to pray quietly. "Mother Mary, spare me, Maria, and the other women from rape, and Antanas from death."

As a sergeant approached the truck, Jadwyga's stomach cramped, sweat broke out on her forehead, and her arms began to shake. Then she fainted. Maria propped Jadwyga up to make it look as though she was sleeping, and then smiled at the sergeant who was rapping on the glass.

Antanas rolled down his window. ~ Mark Creedon

Cultural anthropology is more and more rapidly getting to realize itself as a strictly historical science. ~ Edward Sapir

It's a historical fact that the Stasi did horrible things and that they monitored a lot of people in East Germany, but I find it very interesting to think about the importance of the Western secret services back then and still working today. ~ Christian Schwochow

Anyone who has done historical research knows that the undocumented often have more to say about how the world is put together than do the well pedigreed. ~ Donna J. Haraway

But here's a bit of spoilsport historical reality: It wasn't the finches that inspired Darwin, it was the Mockingbirds. ~ David Quammen

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable.
~ Talal Asad

A recurrent theme in Kissinger's early writing is the historical ignorance of the typical American decision-maker. Lawyers, he remarked in 1968, are the "single most important group in Government, but they do have this drawback - a deficiency in history." For Kissinger, history was doubly important: as a source of illuminating analogies and as the defining factor in national self-understanding. Americans might doubt history's importance, but, as Kissinger wrote, "Europeans, living on a continent covered with ruins testifying to the fallibility of human foresight, feel in their bones that history is more complicated than systems analysis."
-Foreign Affairs, The Meaning of Kissinger: A Realist Reconsidered, By Niall Ferguson ~ Niall Ferguson

Stop throwing the Constitution in my face. It's just a goddamned piece of paper! ~ George W. Bush

Computers have cut-and-paste functions. So does right-wing historical memory. ~ Rick Perlstein

Then, after picking up his papers, Pierre began: "A beautiful woman can be the downfall of a gentleman . . . but the uplift of a beggar! ~ Ted Anthony Roberts

Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error. ~ David Harvey

Racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970. ~ Ruth Bader Ginsburg

In sum: banking theory and practice, as immobilizing and fixating forces, fail to acknowledge men and women as historical beings; problem-posing theory and practice take the people's historicity as their starting point. ~ Paulo Freire

For those who are not familiar with 'the Saturnian configuration', the theory, bizarre in the extreme, can be reduced to its simplest form by positing that the planets Saturn, Venus, Mars and Earth were once much closer to each other. [..] I make no apologies here for the fact that this theory was constructed on the basis of the mytho-historical record rather than from astrophysical considerations. [..]
The reconstruction of this model, together with its attendant event-filled scenario, is the fruit of decades of research - first by David Talbott and myself, later by Ev Cochrane and now Wallace Thornhill. For me, the impetus for this derived directly from the writings of Dr Immanuel Velikovsky, even though it led to the complete abandonment of Velikovsky's own scenario. It has often been stated by those who now oppose Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision cosmic scheme that the good doctor might have been incorrect in details but correct in his overall reconstruction. As the years went by, I came to the opposite conclusion and now claim that Velikovsky was correct in details but entirely wrong in his overall presentation. He had the pieces correct but, unfortunately, displaced them in time. ~ Dwardu Cardona

The media and intelligentsia were partly complicit in Trump's depiction of the world as a dystopia headed for even greater disaster. 'Charge the cockpit or you die!' cried the pro-Trump intellectual right. 'I'd rather see the empire burn to the ground under Trump, opening up at least the possibility of radical change, than cruise on autopilot under Clinton,' said the pro-Trump left. When people believe that the world is heading off a cliff, they are receptive to the perennial appeal of demagogues: 'What do you have to lose?'

But if the media and intellectuals put events into statistical and historical context, rather than constantly crying 'crisis,' they would make it clearer what the answer to that question is. Revolutionary regimes from Nazi Germany and Maoist China to contemporary Venezuela show that people have a tremendous amount to lose when a charismatic leader forces a radical personal vision on a society. A modern liberal democracy is a precious achievement. Until the messiah comes, it will always have problems, but it's better to solve problems than to start a conflagration and hope for the best. ~ Steven Pinker

It's like saying that two and two equals four, but if you wish to believe it, it could also be five ... Evolution is not a theory; it is a fact, every bit as much as the historical fact that William the Conqueror landed in 1066. ~ David Attenborough

The only Bible-honoring conclusion is, of course, that Genesis 1-11 is actual historical truth, regardless of any scientific or chronological problems thereby entailed. ~ Henry M. Morris

You want to find your self in the flow of time, miraculously relieved of your irrelevance . . . I saw the pursuit of historical beauty, the yearning for those higher essences other people had staked their lives on, as the hope for some kind of voice, a chance to join the chorus. I was mad for relevance, connection, some hint that I was not alone. I started scribbling in notebooks in part just so I'd have an excuse, a reason for sitting where I sat, an alibi for being by myself. ~ Charles D'Ambrosio

(On period costume posture coaching
We all stand about like parboiled spaghetti being straightened out. ~ Emma Thompson

Stay with me?" His fingers wound into my hair, and his arm tightened around me. "Always. ~ Amalia Carosella

I've worked a lot of historical stuff back in Sweden and there's always conflict with horses. I get a bit paranoid when I'm on them, and they can sense that and they get a bit paranoid. It ends up in this bad spiral where I don't want to be on them, and they don't want me on their backs. ~ George Blagden

It was the French Revolution that served as the catalyst of this renovation. Its impact was to make the concept of popular sovereignty the new moral justification for the political system of historical capitalism. ~ Immanuel Wallerstein

No language is justly studied merely as an aid to other purposes. It will in fact better serve other purposes, philological or historical, when it is studied for love, for itself. ~ J.R.R. Tolkien

People, her people at least, were always chasing shattered hopes. A father gazing down on dead soil, with a brood of hollow-cheeked children sitting around a barren table. A lonely maid cleaning grates and waiting for a lover who by now wouldn't even recall her name. A weary labourer trudging miles between the hiring fairs, carrying his spade, clothes soiled from sleeping in damp fields. They held candles to storms, her people. They saw their lights extinguished as cruel winds of fate blew. ~ Paul Reid

Even through her coat, he could feel the curve of her arm, making him aware of their differences.
Man and woman.
Hard and soft. ~ Debra Holland

The plea of good intentions is not one that can be allowed to have much weight in passing historical judgment upon a man whose wrong-headedness and distorted way of looking at things produced, or helped to produce, such incalculable evil; there is a wide political applicability in the remark attributed to a famous Texan, to the effect that he might, in the end, pardon a man who shot him on purpose, but that he would surely never forgive one who did so accidentally. ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Respect can be as elusive as the unicorn. I know something of this because I write books that are set in the Middle Ages, and the historical novel is often seen as the unwanted stepchild in the fictional family. I know even more about respect - or the lack thereof - because I live in New Jersey. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

We can go back to the Dark Ages! The crust of learning and good manners and tolerance is so thin! It would just take a few thousand big shells and gas bombs to wipe out all the eager young men, and all the libraries and historical archives and patent offices, all the laboratories and art galleries, all the castles and Periclean temples and Gothic cathedrals, all the cooperative stores and motor factories - every storehouse of learning. No inherent reason why Sissy's grandchildren - if anybody's grandchildren will survive at all - shouldn't be living in caves and heaving rocks at catamounts. ~ Sinclair Lewis

Apparently, the Athena Parthenos had wanted them to visit a place with educational value, because she'd landed right next to a historical marker that read MASSACRE OF BUFORD, on a gravel layby at the intersection of Nowhere and Nothing. ~ Rick Riordan

He knew the way she liked her coffee, her favorite flowers--pink roses--and the meaning of countless things, like the way she straightened up to her full height and raised her left eyebrow when she was holding back on something she wanted to say. ~ Dawn Klinge

Catherine bristled at the amusement in his voice. He could laugh all he wanted when he stood tied to a wall utterly naked. A little humiliation might do him good. ~ Tamara Hughes

....the line of ill-intentional Egyptologist, equipped with a ferocious erudition , have commited their well known crime against science, by becoming guilty of a deliberate falsification of the history of humanity.
Supported by the governing powers of all the Western countries , this ideology, based on a moral and intellectual swindle, easily won out over the true scientific current developed by a parallel group of Egyptologist of good will, whose intellectual uprightness and even courage cannot be stressed stronly enough.
The new Egyptological ideology , born at the opportune monment, reinforced the theorectical bases of imperialist ideology. That is why it easily drowned out the voice of science, by throwing the veil of fasificacation over historical truth. This ideology was spread with the help of considerable publicity and taught the world over, because it alone had the material and financial means for its own propagation.
Thus imperialism, like the prehistoric hunter, first killed the being spiritually and culturally, before trying to eliminate it physically. The negation of the history and intellectual accomplishments of Black Africans was cultural, mental murder,which preceded and paved the way for their genocide here and there in the world. ~ Cheikh Anta Diop

Could any mother amongst us even contemplate such actions? I appeal to all mothers here. ~ Margaret Anne MacLeod

Just as we do not today differentiate between the Roman Republic and the imperial period of the Julio-Claudians when we think of the Roman Empire, so in the future no one will bother to make a distinction between the British Empire-led and the American-Republic-led periods of English-speaking dominance between the late-eighteenth and the twenty-first centuries. It will be recognized that in the majestic sweep of history they had so much in common
and enough that separated them from everyone else
that they ought to be regarded as a single historical entity, which only scholars and pedants will try to describe separately. ~ Andrew Roberts

Newness often makes us fearful, including the newness God brings us, the newness God asks of us. We are like the apostles in the Gospel: often we would prefer to hold on to our own security, to stand in front of a tomb, to think about someone who has died, someone who ultimately lives on only as a memory, like the great historical figures from the past. We are afraid of God's surprises. ~ Pope Francis

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

Fascinating, often hilarious, always devastatingly truthful, The Inconvenient Indian is destined to become a classic of historical narrative. For those who wish to better understand Native peoples, it is a must read. For those who don't wish to understand, it is even more so. ~ Joseph Boyden

Central planning inevitably leads to economic chaos and failure.
Friedrich Hayek called the delusion that a single person or a group
of government planners could possibly possess the knowledge to plan
an entire economy a "fatal conceit." The overwhelming historical
evidence is that the more freedom a nation has, the more economic
opportunities will exist and the more dynamic that nation's economy
will be. Likewise, the more regulations, controls, taxes, governmentrun
industries, protectionism, and other forms of interventionism that
exists, the poorer the country will become. ~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

It is interesting to note that, as historians and archeologists discover art and writings from ancient civilizations, there are certain patterns that show up in each civilization's mythology.
For example: Chinese, Europeans, and ancient central and south Americans all have art depicting large, winged lizards, most of which could breathe fire. While it is possible that the idea of these creatures were shared between the Chinese and Europeans, there is no historical evidence suggesting that they had done so. Besides that, it is near impossible that they could have shared this idea with, say, the Aztecs, as exploration into the new world didn't happen until centuries after the first carvings of the Quetzalcoatl. Each culture portrayed these beings differently, ranging in size, shape, and purpose, but the defining physical traits are still, undeniably and bizarrely, too similar to be a coincidence.
While there are some modern theories for this phenomenon, and no physical evidence suggesting that they existed, it still raises the question: is it possible that dragons were real?
Another example: every civilization in the Common Era has at one point in their history sustained superstitions that, either through ritual or through improper burial, a corpse can rise from the dead and take the life force of living humans to gain great power.
Each culture had their own name for these monsters, but as time has progressed society has been satisfied to call them the same ~ August Westman

I have a lot of blurring between fiction and non-fiction in so many of my works. For example, my first novel, 'When Nietzsche Wept,' has a great deal of non-fiction in it. I didn't create many characters at all. Almost all of them are historical characters that actually existed. ~ Irvin D. Yalom