History Revealed Quotes

This isn't just Flint's fight. We built all our cities out of lead. We were sure we could make this metal work for us. History revealed a pattern of poisoning, but we were certain that we could contain it, control it. Progress came when we acknowledged how terribly harmful lead is and instituted anti-lead laws that reduced our exposure to one of the world's best-known neurotoxins. But the next great challenge - a tremendously difficult one - is reckoning with the lead that is still in our environment. Individual solutions, from purchasing bottled water and investing in private purification devices, isn't enough. As the nineteenth-century water wars revealed, a community is not safe and certainly will not thrive if only some have access to clean water and others do not. Infrastructure, the ties that literally bind us, one to another, requires our consistent care and attention. At a certain point, 'doing more with less' no longer functions as a mandate. Sometimes less is just less. Public health historians Gerald Markowitz and David Rosner put it this way: 'If the history of lead poisoning has taught us anything, it is that the worlds we as a society construct, or at least allow to be built in our name, to a large extent determine how we live and how we die. ~ Anna Clark

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization. ~ Arthur Henderson

The Seven Cities of Gold always fascinated me. Southwestern U.S. history especially fascinates me. The whole spur of the Spanish exploration of the Southwestern U.S. was the search for these mythical Seven Cities of Gold. ~ Neil Peart

Ready yourselves!' Mullone heard himself say, which was strange, he thought, for he knew his men were prepared.
A great cry came from beyond the walls that were punctuated by musket blasts and Mullone readied himself for the guns to leap into action. Mullone felt a tremor. The ground shook and then the first rebels poured through the gates like an oncoming tide. Mullone saw the leading man; both hands gripping a green banner, face contorted with zeal. The flag had a white cross in the centre of the green field and the initials JF below it. John Fitzstephen. Then, there were more men behind him, tens, then scores. And then time seemed to slow.
The guns erupted barely twenty feet from them.
Later on, Mullone would remember the great streaks of flame leap from the muzzles to lick the air and all of the charging rebels were shredded and torn apart in one terrible instant. Balls ricocheted on stone and great chunks were gouged out by the bullets. Blood sprayed on the walls as far back as the arched gateway, limbs were shorn off, and Mullone watched in horror as a bloodied head tumbled down the sloped street towards the barricade.
'Jesus sweet suffering Christ!' Cahill gawped at the carnage as the echo of the big guns resonated like a giant's beating heart.
Trooper O'Shea bent to one side and vomited at the sight of the twitching, bleeding and unrecognisable lumps that had once been men. A man staggered with both arms missing. Another crawled back to the ga ~ David Cook

[While writing history], I've kept the most interesting company imaginable with people long gone. Some I've come to know better than many I know in real life, since in real life we don't get to read other people's mail. ~ David McCullough

Do you know a Psychopath?

You do not know me; but after reading my memoir you will know me a little better and you will have had the experience of safely getting into the mind and life of a young psychopath in training.

Critics have written: It is a powerful and unusual memoir; brutal and raw.

A Psychopath In Training: In 1997 psychiatrist's contracted by the Correctional Service and the National Parole Board wrote in their final report, before I was released back into the community, they had diagnosed me to be a psychopath.

A Psychopath: How does one become a Psychopath?

After of the death of my young mother, when I was fourteen, I became a ward of the state and forced into the care and custody of the Catholic Christian Brothers at St. John's Catholic Training School for Boys until after I turned sixteen. Since then I have been incarcerated over seventeen years in various prisons, institutions and juvenile detention centres. I have been interviewed and treated by so many prison psychiatrists and psychologists I should be called the professional.

In my youth I have experienced almost every kind of sleaze, sex and violence humans can inflict on each other. I had to learn the hard way on how to identify and deal with the people who were the dangerous psychopath's in my life and the proof I succeeded is; I am still alive.

My book cover depicts what is coming out of the government foster homes and prison ~ Michael A. Hodge

The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it. ~ Henry David Thoreau

I was thinking of writing a little foreword saying that history is, after all, based on people's recollections, which change with time. ~ Frederik Pohl

One would be hard put to find a set of whole numbers with a more fascinating history and more elegant properties surrounded by greater depths of mystery
and more totally useless
than the perfect numbers. ~ Martin Gardner

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose. ~ Fred Hoyle

Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that - in my humble opinion - allows us to put the present into much better perspective. ~ Mohsin Hamid

Most of life is an ongoing process of learning. We don't stop learning once we grow out of childhood and we don't stop learning once we finish school. Learning is not necessarily a painful process but it can be when we internally punish or abuse ourselves for mistakes. We do this when we forget that:
1. We are always learning.
2. Mistakes are a part of the process of learning.
3. If we knew the right answer, we would use the right answer.
4. Sometimes, the right answer is only revealed by choosing the wrong answer.
5. Maybe then, it wasn't the wrong answer after all. ~ Emily Maroutian

We carry with us the weight of the past, and because we do not have a finely developed sense of history and historicism, it is a past that is still alive in our present. We wear the dust of history on our foreheads, and the mud of the future on our feet. ~ Shashi Tharoor

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. ~ Steven Pinker

There is nothing finer in history than Thomas at Chickamauga. ~ Henry M. Cist

Are you aware that humanity is just a blip? Not even a blip. Just a fraction of a fraction of what the universe has been and will become? Talk about perspective. I figure I can't feel so entirely stupid about saying what I said because, first of all, it's true. And second of all, there will be no remnant of me or my stupidity. No fossil or geographical shift that can document, really, even the most important historical human beings, let alone my paltry admissions. ~ Meg Mullins

It was like a page torn from a history book, from some historical novel about the captivity of babylon or Spanish Inquisition. ~ Elie Wiesel

For we conceive it as the aim of a philosopher, as such, to do somewhat more than define and formulate the common normal opinions of mankind. His function is to tell men what they ought to think, rather than what they do think: he is expected to transcend Common Sense in his premises, and is allowed a certain divergence from Common Sense in his conclusions. It is true that the limits of this deviation are firmly, though indefinitely, fixed: the truth of a philosopher's premises will always be tested by the acceptability of his conclusions: if in any important point he be found in flagrant conflict with common opinion, his method is likely to be declared invalid. Still, though he is expected to establish and concatenate at least the main part of the commonly accepted moral rules, he is not necessarily bound to take them as the basis on which his own system is constructed. Rather, we should expect that the history of Moral Philosophy--so far at least as those whom we may call orthodox thinkers are concerned--would be a history of attempts to enunciate, in full breadth and clearness, those primary intuitions of Reason, by the scientific application of which the common moral thought of mankind may be at once systematized and corrected. ~ Henry Sidgwick

I have come to the realization that history is not a fixed thing, a collection of precise dates, facts and events (even cogent commencement quotes) that add up to a quantifiable, certain, confidently known, truth. It is a mysterious and malleable thing. ~ Ken Burns

Truth to tell, at any point in our lives we've forgotten more than we know about our own history. The world moves on, and so do we, and what was once important fades away. ~ Dathan Auerbach

To paraphrase what the President of the Soviet Union, Nikita Khrushchev said on American TV in 1953, "You Americans are so gullible! No, you won't accept Communism outright. But we'll keep feeding you small doses of Socialism until you finally wake up and find you already have Communism. We won't have to fight you. We'll so weaken your economy until you fall like over-ripe fruit into our hand. ~ D. Jonathan Scott

It is the first vision that counts. The artist has only to remain true to his dream and it will possess his work in such a manner that it will resemble the work of no other ... for no two visions are alike, and those who reach the heights have all toiled up steep mountains by a different route. To each has been revealed a different panorama. ~ Albert Pinkham Ryder

History was indeed controlled by blind forces, as well as character and courage and treachery and love. And accident and random chance. And stray bullets and telegrams and tips. And cats. ~ Connie Willis

I think continuity is the devil. I think it's constricting and restrictive, I think it's alienating and off-putting, and it inflicts an artifact of linear time as we experience it on something that exists outside of linear time as well as keeps new readership away by keeping comics a matter of trivia and history rather than actual stories. ~ Matt Fraction

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference. ~ Jared Diamond

[The Democratic Party]it's a party with an incredible century-and-a-half history of institutional racism. ~ Sean Hannity

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments. ~ Anne Michaels

What is there in this big wide world for a man to talk about with certainty besides his homeland, home and family? ~ Janvier Chouteu-Chando

Movies began as a communal experience. Even though we now watch them as DVD's, sometimes alone on our computers, mostly in the history of cinema it has been a communal experience. ~ Alison Owen

Since the dawn of time every one will die,
Let the history books note my death with loyalty at heart. ~ Wen Tianxiang

The future of history belongs to the poor and exploited. ~ Gustavo Gutierrez

Science?is so greatly opposed to history and tradition that it cannot be absorbed by our civilization. ~ Max Born

He broke me down past the flesh, past the muscle, past the bone, down to my soul and in a loud provocation, he asked, "What are you made of?"
After I gathered the broken bits and pieces of my life together, I shouted at the top of my lungs, "HOPE! Unbreakable, undeniable, irrevocable hope! ~ Jay Grewal

At a purely practical level, history is important because it provides the basic skills needed for students to go further in sociology, politics, international relations and economics. History is also an ideal discipline for almost all careers in the law, the civil service and the private sector. ~ Antony Beevor

In the seventh century the Arabs created a new world into which other peoples were drawn. In the nineteenth and twentieth, they were themselves drawn into a new world created in western Europe. ~ Albert Hourani

To be a Russian writer at the end of the nineteenth century must have meant bearing an inescapably bitter fate. The more they tried to escape from Russia, the more deeply Russia swallowed them. ~ Haruki Murakami

Suddenly all those individuals who yesterday felt that "we" meant only their families, their professions, or perhaps their communities, become men of the nation. Their emotions and thoughts, their egos, that "something" within them, all are transformed: they have become historical. ~ Oswald Spengler

Nothing in a graduate degree in art history prepares you for the eloquence of the eraser. ~ Adam Gopnik

A vital film that needed to be made at this point in history and has been made magnificently. ~ James Cromwell

After the signing of the Constitution, Benjamin Franklin was asked by a woman on the street, "What have you given us, sir?" Franklin Responded, "A Republic, if you can keep it."
A critical moment in history has come; our Republic is in jeopardy. Can we keep it?
If the answer to that question, as I fear, is "no," then we have no one to blame but ourselves. ~ Glenn Beck

History repeats itself. That's one of the things wrong with history. ~ Clarence Darrow

Contrary to what one would expect, it is easier for the advanced to imitate the backward than the other way around. The backward and the weak see in imitation an act of submission and a proof of their inadequacy. They must rid themselves of their sense of inferiority, must demonstrate their prowess, before they will open their minds and hearts to all that the world can teach them. Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered. The backward, says de Tocqueville, "will go forth in arms to gain knowledge but will not receive it when it comes to them." Thus the grotesque truculence, posturing, conceit, brazenness, and defiance which usually assail our senses whenever a backward country sets out to modernize itself in a hurry stem partly from the desperate need of the weak for an illusion of strength and superiority if they are to imitate rapidly and easily. ~ Eric Hoffer

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men. ~ Virginia Woolf

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women's rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women's rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens' rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia. ~ Adam Selzer

In the history of the human mind there has never been a useful thought or a profound truth that has not found its century and admirers. ~ Madame De Stael

Even in the obscure vast history of a planet the time it takes to make a forest counts. It takes a while. And not every planet can do it; it is no common effect, that tangling of the sun's first cool light in the shadow and complexity of innumberable wind-stirred branches. ~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The dead are the past and we cannot escape the past. Without the past there will be no future. ~ M.R. Gott

There is a quality in the people of Dover that may well be the key to the coming German disaster. They are incorrigibly, incorruptibly unimpressed. The German, with his uniform and his pageantry and his threats and plans, does not impress these people at all. The Dover man has taken perhaps a little more pounding than most, not in great blitzes, but in every-day bombing and shelling, and still he is not impressed. Jerry is like the weather to him. He complains about it and then promptly goes on with what he was doing...Weather and Jerry are alike in that they are inconvenient and sometimes make messes. Surveying a building wrecked by a big shell, he says, "Jerry was bad last night," as he would discuss a windstorm. ~ John Steinbeck