Short History Quotes

The president, who finds so much to complain about in other areas of the world, apparently saw nothing wrong in recognizing a Communist regime that has killed more people in its short history of control over the teeming millions of that great country than any other collection of dictators or tyrants in the history of the world. ~ Barry Goldwater

The 1969 experience has been a rude awakening for many hedge-fund investors and has left some of them with strong reservations about the whole concept. For the first time in their relatively short history, the funds are not growing: in fact, some have suffered large withdrawals of capital, and a few have actually folded. ~ Carol Loomis

I thought Bill Bryson's 'A Short History of Nearly Everything' was remarkable. Managing to be entertaining while still delivering all that hard science was a pretty good trick to pull off. ~ Mark Haddon

Some species of trees spread root systems underground that interconnect the individual trunks and weave the individual trees into a more stable whole that can't so easily be blown down in the wind. Stories and conversations are like those roots.
("A Short History of Silence") ~ Rebecca Solnit

Modern dynamical systems theory has a relatively short history. It begins with Poincare (of course) ... [to whom] a global understanding of the gross behavior of all solutions of the system was more important than the local behavior of particular, analytically-precise solutions. ~ Robert L. Devaney

Hocus was an old cunning attorney. The words of consecration, "Hoc est corpus," were travestied into a nickname for jugglery, as "Hocus-pocus." - John Richard Green, A Short History of the English People, 1874. see Charles Macklin. ~ John Arbuthnot

Nero would be long since forgotten without his outbursts of bloody clowning. ~ Emil Cioran, A Short History of Decay ~ Emil Cioran

One whose testimony made a major impact more than a decade ago is Ben Barres, formerly Barbara Barres, a biologist at Stanford University. In 2006, he wrote in the journal Nature about the bias he had experienced as a woman in the sciences, from losing fellowships to less qualified male candidates to being told a boyfriend must have helped her with her math. He was told that he was smarter than his sister by a man who confused his former, female self for that sister.
("A Short History of Silence") ~ Rebecca Solnit

Billions of people have seen and been influenced by movies in the short history of this industry. ~ Conrad Hall

We're living in a tremendously new landscape, and the possibility of what can be created is immense. These tools of the moving image have a relatively short history in art, and what we can do with them is still largely unknown. We are still innovating and finding ways to tell stories. ~ Doug Aitken

I very much was inspired by Bill Bryson. He does cover science, but more often, it's a mixture of science and travel, and whatever he happens to be writing about - Shakespeare, Australia, the United Kingdom, or when he covers science in 'A Short History Of Nearly Everything' - he has an incredible ability to be both entertaining and enlightening. ~ Mary Roach

States organized for war will make war as surely as hens will lay eggs ... ~ H.G.Wells

The economic logic of gathering so many animals together to feed them cheap corn in CAFOs is hard to argue with; it has made meat, which used to be a special occasion in most American homes, so cheap and abundant that many of us now eat it three times a day. Not so compelling is the biological logic behind this cheap meat. Already in their short history CAFOs have produced more than their share of environmental and health problems: polluted water and air, toxic wastes, novel and deadly pathogens. ~ Michael Pollan

She stands in the doorway to our room, blue sundress rumpled, the rosy light of sunset slanting through the wide widows and illuminating the gold of her hair. I'm struck speechless, my breath cutting short. I am not a poetic man, but I want to be one now. I want to do justice to her beauty and the way she fills me with a strange mixture of utter peace and demanding need. ~ Kristen Callihan

In schoolbooks and in literature we can separate ecclesiastical and political history; in the life of mankind they are intertwined. ~ Leopold Von Ranke

A terrible confession it was (he put his hat on again) but now, at the age of fifty-three, one scarcely needed people any more. Life itself, every moment of it, every drop of it, here, this instant, now, in the sun, in Regent's Park, was enough. Too much, indeed. A whole lifetime was too short to bring out, now that one had acquired the power, the full flavour; to extract every ounce of pleasure, every shade of meaning< which both were so much more solid than they used to be, so much less personal. ~ Virginia Woolf

We take it for granted that Jesus was not interested in political life: his mission was purely religious. Indeed we have witnessed ... the 'iconization' of the life of Jesus: 'This is a Jesus of hieratic, stereotyped gestures, all representing theological themes. In this way, the life of Jesus is no longer a human life, submerged in history, but a theological life
an icon. ~ Gustavo Gutierrez

People only invoke history to ballast their arguments in the present." "Maybe ~ Kim Stanley Robinson

If you define yourself as someone fixing education, there's nothing short-range you can do to fix education directly. It's labor intensive. You have to change the way people act. You have to convince people, and change people. ~ Deborah Meier

As a reporter, going around, you hear stories you can't prove, which means you can't put them in the newspaper. But they're good stories, and I would jot them down thinking maybe one day I could write that as a short story. ~ Pete Hamill

He cupped her face and held her still, as he looked into her brown eyes; she was all flash and no bang. She talked big, but when it came down to it, she was a simple girl. ~ Elaine White

History is a record of human nature in action. ~ James Carlos Blake

I'm here to take him into custody and deliver him to the Council. (Celena)
Well, that sucks. Bank robbery, handing out the passwords for the Dark-Hunter Web site, carjacking, mugging, cats mixing with dogs, and now this ... writing a short story. High crimes all. You get the rope and we'll hang him for it. God forbid the whole twelve subscribers of that magazine should actually read a fictional story and think it real. (Rafael) ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon

You will kneel," Tetsuji said.
Neil had a feeling he was going to regret this for the rest of his very short life, but he smiled and said, "Make me. ~ Nora Sakavic

Life is short is what some niggaz said; not if you measure life - by how one lives and what he did. ~ Nas

The emotional pattern seems to be something like, "[Karl] Polanyi, a person of the left like me, says many true things, beautifully. Therefore his tales about what happened in economic history must be true." Marx before him got similar treatment. Lately the more eloquent of the environmentalists, such as Wendell Berry, get it too. People want to believe that beauty is truth. A supporting emotional frame on the left arises from the very idea of historical progress: "We must be able to do so much better than this wretched capitalism." It is not true, but it motivates. ~ Deirdre N. McCloskey

Always the following wind of history
Of others' wisdom makes a buoyant air
Till we come suddenly on pockets where
Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem
Abrupt, untrained, competing with no lie
Our fathers shouted once. ~ W. H. Auden

I have made decisions that turned out to be wrong, and went back and did it another way, and still took less time than many who procrastinated over the original decision. Your brain is capable of handling 140, 000 million bits of information in one second, and if you take hours or days or weeks to reach a vital decision, you are short-circuiting your most valuable property. ~ Jerry Gillies

Like a last signpost to the other path, Napoleon appeared, the most isolated and late-born man there has even been, and in him the problem of the noble ideal as such made flesh
one might well ponder what kind of problem it is; Napoleon this synthesis of the inhuman and the superhuman ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

I like kindness. Who doesn't? Life is definitely too short for self-centered, abusive people. ~ Ellen Greene

The amusement she had drawn from their disapproval was a slavish remnant, a derisive dance on the north bank of the Ohio. There was no question of forgiving them. She had not, in any case, a forgiving nature; and the injury they had done her was not done by them. If she were to start forgiving she must needs forgive Society, the Law, the Church, the History of Europe, the Old Testament, great-great-aunt Salome and her prayer-book, the Bank of England, Prostitution, the Architect of Apsley Terrace, and half a dozen other useful props of civilization. All she could do was to go on forgetting them. But now she was able to forget them without flouting them by her forgetfulness. ~ Sylvia Townsend Warner

Revolutions existed in history, books were written about them, and lectures given: they were complicated phenomena, scientific, remote. While here, the riot of a week ago had turned out to be a real revolution and the shadow of death actually threatened all of us who were of the ruling cast. ~ Grand Duchess Maria Alexandrovna Of Russia

Tasmanian history is a study of human isolation unprecedented except in science fiction - namely, complete isolation from other humans for 10,000 years. ~ Jared Diamond

No one can be certain where a nation which spans two continents, whose history begins in the faint traces of early civilization, a nation now struggling to find a new and valid philosophy of existence, will be propelled by the transcendental forces of the nuclear age. ~ Harrison Salisbury

I won't have it, in poetry, that bulk counts. People say to me, 'Now settle down and do a long work, since you have shown the public that you can produce beautiful short poetry.' And their implication tells me that making two verses or a short poem does not satisfy their concept of what an accomplished poet should be able to do. Bulk they want, as evidence of a man's power. ~ Robert Frost

I want to feel like I'm making a difference in this world. And I want some time for living rather than just working. Life is for living, isn't it? It can't be all just for working ~ Zack Love

I thought I was in love, but it was only a head cold. (Humans) ~ Robert Emmett

I have some other novels I want to write. I have a lot of short stories - I love the short story. ~ George R R Martin

Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.
[Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999] ~ Anna Quindlen

Suddenly, in my mind I hear my father say, 'Mind over matter, son. You can do this. You can accomplish anything as long as you really want to. ~ Marc Ashton

Well, the ancients might not have been very heroic. Most of them were probably like Mother, crouched somewhere trying to work out how to make fake jawbone jewelry that would look like the real thing. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

Even the most subjected person has moments of rage and resentment so intense that they respond, they act against. There is an inner uprising that leads to rebellion, however short- lived. It may be only momentary but it takes place. That space within oneself where resistance is possible remains. ~ Bell Hooks

I come from a town of great musicians: Washington, D.C. It's no joke, that history. ~ Henry Rollins

US journalists, for years overwhelmingly enamored of Barack Obama, were now commonly speaking of him in these terms: as some sort of grave menace to press freedoms, the most repressive leader in this regard since Richard Nixon. That was quite a remarkable turn for a politician who was ushered into power vowing the most transparent administration in US history. ~ Glenn Greenwald

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

The people who make history are not the people who make it who are there but the people who make it and then write about it. ~ Julian Cope

The barbarians of Germany had felt, and still dreaded, the arms of the young Caesar; his soldiers were the companions of his victory; the grateful provincials enjoyed the blessings of his reign; but the favourites, who had opposed his elevation, were offended by his virtues; and they justly considered the friend of the people as the enemy of the court. ~ Edward Gibbon