Peoples History Quotes

Other people's history can be read comfortably, the way a novel can be read comfortably. By my own history? I'm on the run from my own history, and catching my breath in the present. Escapist. But the merciless present pushes us back again toward our history. The mind keeps talking. ~ Intizar Hussain

I hate it when they tell us how far we've came to be; as if our people's history started with slavery. ~ Immortal Technique

Armenian Cognac

A bottle of cognac from Yerevan
is on my kitchen table
as closed as that history
and as silent
If I broke it down I'd lose a hundred years
of love
and if I opened it the ancestors
hanging here in black and white
would come down from the walls
to have a glass with me
I know a history that's been forgotten
and I know why that bottle of cognac
stands with such singular pride....

If I broke it now I'd lose a hundred years
of my people's history ~ Najwan Darwish

Culture is simultaneously the fruit of a people's history and a determinant of history. ~ Amilcar Cabral

I always wonder about people's history and their lives, especially people that are a little bit more distant, who obviously have had some kind of a thing, and you know there's some reason why they're not able to connect. It's not because they don't want to. They don't have the ability. ~ Annette Bening

. . . [A]ny history that deals with the efforts of the populace to defend itself from the abuses of wealth and tyranny is people's history . . . A people's history should be not only an account of popular struggle against oppression but an exposé of the anti-people's history that has prevailed among generations of mainstream historians. It should be a critical history about a people's oppressors, those who propagated an elitist ideology and a loathing of the common people that distorts the historical record down to this day. ~ Michael Parenti

Upon examination of a people's history, beware the story teller's motives. ~ T.F. Hodge

Stable husbanding of the land requires community-wide language and norms for resolving interpersonal conflict, facilitating barter and trade, determining shares of work and output and maintaining organizational hierarchies. Although such social functions are the requisites of community life everywhere, the ways of performing them evolve differently from place to place. Each society develops its practices and sets of myths, symbols and rational justifications, which usually are held to be superior to those of other societies.
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And just as material reasons for self-sufficiency can turn communities towards economic imperialism, so the ideational justifications for autonomy can turn them into presumptuous civilizers of other peoples. ~ Seyom Brown

If we admit that some infinite being has controlled the destinies of persons and peoples, history becomes a most cruel and bloody farce. ~ Robert Green Ingersoll

The Old Testament traces one complete cycle of that history, one people's rise and fall. This particular people is unique only in that they're the ones who begin to remember what man was made for. Moses' revelation at the burning bush is as profound as any religious scene in literature. There, he sees that the eternal creation and destruction of nature is not a mere process but the mask of a personal spirit, I AM THAT I AM. The centuries that follow that revelation are a spiraling semicircle of sin and shame and redemption, of freedom recovered and then surrendered in return for imperial greatness, of a striving toward righteousness through law that reveals only the impossibility of righteousness, of power and pride and fall. It's every people's history, in other words, but seen anew in the light of the fire of I AM. It ~ Andrew Klavan

The actual stuff my family owned, those boxes under my stairs, I can't quite bear to look at. I like other people's things better. They come with other people's history. ~ Gillian Flynn

The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources
because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples. ~ Lyndon B. Johnson

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view. ~ John Henrik Clarke

Philip remembered the story of the Eastern King who, desiring to know the history of man, was brought by a sage five hundred volumes; busy with affairs of state, he bade him go and condense it; in twenty years the sage returned and his history now was in no more than fifty volumes, but the King, too old then to read so many ponderous tomes, bade him go and shorten it once more; twenty years passed again and the sage, old and gray, brought a single book in which was the knowledge the King had sought; but the King lay on his death-bed, and he had no time to read even that; and then the sage gave him the history of man in a single line; it was this: he was born, he suffered, and he died. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

The seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that generally success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics. The judgment of history leans heavily on the outcome of success or failure; it spells the difference between the traitor and the patriotic hero. There can be no such thing as a successful traitor, for if one succeeds he becomes a founding father. ~ Saul Alinsky

Actors live dependent on being validated by other people's opinions. I don't understand what it is I do that people want. I don't know what an actor does. I have no credentials. I don't know what I'm doing. ~ Shia Labeouf

A lot of Chinese martial arts films were based on Chinese martial arts novels. And these novels created a world of putting history, calligraphy, and martial arts into one. ~ Donnie Yen

... "England [sic] is just a small island. Its roads and houses are small. With few exceptions, it doesn't make things that people in the rest of the world want to buy. And if it hadn't been separated from the continent by water, it almost certainly would have been lost to Hitler's ambitions."
~ nothing about its people and their steel will or courage, nothing about their history and legacy we share, nothing about the timbre of their values and virtues, just ".. ~ Mitt Romney

I just realized that with the invention of the iPhone and others you now get to see the top of people's heads. ~ Bill Engvall

The power of the deductive network produced in physics has been illustrated in a delightful article by Victor F. Weisskopf. He begins by taking the magnitudes of six physical constants known by measurement: the mass of the proton, the mass and electric charge of the electron, the light velocity, Newton's gravitational constant, and the quantum of action of Planck.

He adds three of four fundamental laws (e.g., de Broglie's relations connecting particle momentum and particle energy with the wavelength and frequency, and the Pauli exclusion principle), and shows that one can then derive a host of different, apparently quite unconnected, facts that happen to be known to us by observation separately .... ~ Gerald Holton

[Comics is] one of the last havens for honesty when it comes to a reader's genuine response to art. Most of us, if we don't find any sympathy or pleasure, for example, in a modern painting, are likely to blame our own ignorance of the history and theory of painting. But nobody pretends to like a bad comic strip. Such harshness is necessary for any real truth to surface, I think, and for art to really contribute anything to life. Though I don't know. I could be wrong. ~ Chris Ware

As a global society, we do not have to agree, endorse or condone the lifestyle choices of others. However, history has taught us that we equally cannot and should not excuse those who would hide behind religion or misuse God's word to justify bigotry and persecution. ~ Joyce Meyer

In the United States those bits of our history that remain are paved over, sanitized, packaged for easy consumption. At those sites not already lost to commercial development, we walk between velvet ropes, herded by guides, warned not to touch. Our icons are preserved under glass, their magic demystified in glossy brochures. ~ Biloine W. Young

Here's the most startling irony I know in film history: Antonioni, who is often denigrated by left-wing critics as a formalist and aesthete gives us radical realism through the long take, and what he gives us
this is his metaphysical wager
is real outside the film, off the set, beyond the camera and underneath the surface of everyday life. ~ Frank Lentricchia

We should use our imagination more than our memory. ~ Shimon Peres

I think the decision to make substances like steroids from plants, rather than from animal tissues, was a landmark in the history of medicine as well as the history of chemistry. ~ Gregory Petsko

I focused on where she was from of course, her voice and her history, her relationship with God - her religion. This was probably the strongest relationship she has had, really. She never seemed to maintain close relationships with husbands. ~ Gretchen Mol

Community development has a long history of innovation and learning from experience. ~ Ben Bernanke

I belong to America, as much as I belong to Russia - I belong to England, as much as I belong to France - I belong to Bulgaria, as much as I belong to Turkey - I belong to India, as much as I belong to Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on. I belong to every nation on this planet. Every country is my country - every culture is my culture - every history is my history. One who sacrifices the self in the service of others, no longer sees any separation whatsoever between the self and the rest of the world - it all becomes one. ~ Abhijit Naskar

American history offers no parallel to the friendship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, spanning the first half century of the Republic ... The publication, in full and integrated form, of the remarkable correspondence between these two eminent men is a notable event. ~ Dumas Malone

One major problem with any science is that people who don't know the conceptual history of their field go round re-inventing the elliptical wheel. ~ Walter M. Fitch

President Obama and our all-of-the-above energy strategy is the real deal. We are proud of the fact that we are importing less oil than at any time in modern history, and it has been because of the president's vision and courage. ~ Ken Salazar

They told us we had no history but darkness, so they kept the books away for fear we might understand the truth better, and thus find those lost selves. ~ Wayétu Moore

Well, for us, in history where goodness is a rare pearl, he who was good almost takes precedence over he who was great. ~ Victor Hugo

in that moment all the painful history of four hundred years of slavery entered my body in a way it hadn't before and I broke down and sobbed, Dominique, I sobbed and realized more than ever that the white man has a lot to answer for ~ Bernardine Evaristo

In this martial world dominated by men, women had little place. The Church's teachings might underpin feudal morality, yet when it came to the practicalities of life, a ruthless pragmatism often came into play. Kings and noblemen married for political advantage, and women rarely had any say in how they or their wealth were to be disposed in marriage. Kings would sell off heiresses and rich widows to the highest bidder, for political or territorial advantage, and those who resisted were heavily fined.

Young girls of good birth were strictly reared, often in convents, and married off at fourteen or even earlier to suit their parents' or overlord's purposes. The betrothal of infants was not uncommon, despite the church's disapproval. It was a father's duty to bestow his daughters in marriage; if he was dead, his overlord or the King himself would act for him. Personal choice was rarely and issue.

Upon marriage, a girl's property and rights became invested in her husband, to whom she owed absolute obedience. Every husband had the right to enforce this duty in whichever way he thought fit--as Eleanor was to find out to her cost. Wife-beating was common, although the Church did at this time attempt to restrict the length of the rod that a husband might use. ~ Alison Weir

We have this history of impossible solutions to insoluble problems. ~ Will Eisner

If memory is the thread of personal identity, history is the thread of community identity. ~ Carter Lindberg

The gift blesses the giver. ~ Hilary Mantel

I have thoroughly gone through the subject of the Incarnation; and if it served you, could at any time give you the history from the beginning of the controversies on this subject, and of its present form. ~ Edward Irving

What Ottawa and Washington used to think about Turkey or Iran was not very important because we really didn't think much about either, but now what we think about them is extremely important - to ourselves and to many other peoples. ~ Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters. ~ Aurin Squire

Last night I snuck an orchestra into the elevator at my apartment. We made elevator music history until Marvin got his oboe caught in the door and Mrs. Hoffstead started singing "Yes We Have No Bananas Today" in the hall so loud the police were called in from Equador. ~ Jarod Kintz

We have to start processing what we're really made of in America. American character is not dead. American integrity and honesty are not dead. When we're backed up against the wall against the largest corporations in the history of corporations, it's there. ~ Josh Fox

You can't start over. There's no such thing as starting over. There's only history. And right now you're making tomorrow's history. So go out, and do something that will be fun to remember. ~ Jill Davis

History is written by victors," said Duko. "But I have little use for history. It is the future with which I am concerned. ~ Raymond E. Feist

History will be kind to me for I have written it. Winston Churchill ~ Ron Mayes

More than seven years were gone since this little history of sorrowful interest had reached it's close; and time had softened down much, perhaps nearly all of peculiar attachment to him,- but she had been to dependent on time alone; no aid had been given in change of place, or in novelty or enlargement of society.- No one had ever come within the Kellynch circle, who could bear a comparison with Frederick Wentworth, as he stood in her memory. ~ Jane Austen

Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples. ~ Claire Tomalin

Broad based upon her people's will, And compassed by the inviolate sea. ~ Alfred Lord Tennyson

Certain kinds of information are like smoke: they work their way into people's eyes and minds whether sought out or not, and with no regard to personal preference. ~ Haruki Murakami

Regard for the past only extends to its outward forms. ~ Henrik Bering

You never know how you look through other people's eyes. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

I once asked my friends if they'd ever held things that gave them a spooky sense of history. Ancient pots with three-thousand-year-old thumbprints in the clay, said one. Antique keys, another. Clay pipes. Dancing shoes from WWII. Roman coins I found in a field. Old bus tickets in second-hand books. Everyone agreed that what these small things did was strangely intimate; they gave them the sense, as they picked them up and turned them in their fingers, of another person, an unknown person a long time ago, who had held that object in their hands. You don't know anything about them, but you feel the other person's there, one friend told me. It's like all the years between you and them disappear. Like you become them, somehow. ~ Helen Macdonald

I didn't choose Russia but Russia chose me. I had been fascinated from an early age by the culture, the language, the literature and the history to the place. ~ Helen Dunmore

The pa system has broken down. Society has broken down. ~ Theresa Sjoquist

You'll never have control over other people's decisions, or what cards life deals you. Your power lies in the choosing of your response. That is the one thing you can control. ~ John Mark Green