Social History Quotes

To us children he (Mr Ewing) was our very own 'Mr Chips' and invariably we would each receive half a crown whenever we encountered him on his afternoon walk. If we were particularly lucky, he would send us to the 'Big House' for ice-cream – a rare treat in the early 1950s ~ Bill Scott

I read a lot of social history. If I'm in an art gallery and a picture intrigues me, I immediately write down the title and I google it. I do a lot of googling and looking out for good stories. I can almost smell them sometimes. ~ Emma Donoghue

Norman Rockwell saved my life. ~ Jane Allen Petrick

All other forms of history - economic history, social history, psychological history, above all sociology - seem to me history with the history left out. ~ A.J.P. Taylor

Tell the Truth. Make it Special.

Life's a Beach. And then you Drown.

Good Ideas cost no more than Bad Ones. ~ Justin Allison

The Enlightenment may have made its most lasting impact in the way we live and think today through its social history. Our institutions and laws, our conception of the state, and our political sensitivity all stem from Enlightenment ideas… Remarkably enough, at the center of these ideas stands the age-old concept of natural law. Much if the Enlightenment's innovation in in political theory may be traced to a change in the interpretation of that concept. ~ Louis Dupré

No realm was too petty: The Ministry of Posts ruled that henceforth when trying to spell a word over the telephone a caller could no longer say "D as in David," because "David" was a Jewish name. The caller had to use "Dora." "Samuel" became "Siegfried." And so forth. "There has been nothing in social history more implacable, more heartless and more devastating than the present policy in Germany against the Jews," Consul General Messersmith told Undersecretary Phillips in a long letter dated September 29, 1933. He wrote, "It is definitely the aim of the Government, no matter what it may say to the outside or in Germany, to eliminate the Jews from German life. ~ Erik Larson

Despite the fact we give hurricanes names like Katrina and Rita, a hurricane isn't a self-contained unit. A hurricane is an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions - air pressure, ground temperature, humidity, wind and so on. The same applies to us: we aren't self-contained units either. Like weather patterns, we are also an impermanent, ever-changing phenomenon arising out of a particular set of interacting conditions. Without food, water, air and shelter, we'd be dead. Without our genes, family, friends, social history, and culture, wouldn't act or feel as we do. ~ Kristin Neff

Personally, my interest in social history ends around 1959, by which time I was an adolescent. I've always attributed this to my particular sensibilities. I like formality and elegance, and I'm fundamentally conservative. ~ Laurie Graham

Do try The House by fresh new author, Susannah Mansfield, it's funny, sad and very different, you'll love the characters and the stories. ~ Susannah Mansfield

Nightclub City tells the behind-the-scenes story of Manhattan's glamorous nightlife at its peak. Packed with colorful characters, terrific original research, and an unusually accessible writing style, Nightclub City is a gritty social history of America's most glitzy fantasies. ~ Debby Applegate

I just wanted to do something important. ~ Norman Rockwell

It's a shame for women's history to be all about men
first boys, then other boys, then men men men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over whenever they occurred. (Our teachers deplored this and added extra units about social history and protest movements, but that was still the message of the books.) ~ Elizabeth Kostova

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve. ~ Denise Mina

Once we begin to speak of men mixing their labour with the earth, we are in a whole world of new relations between man and nature, and to separate natural history from social history becomes extremely problematic. ~ Raymond Williams

Planned parenthood in the social history of the Western countries is, indeed, a phenomenon instrin-sically related to those very changes in peoples attitudes which, on the political plane, have been causing the trend towards economic planning. ~ Gunnar Myrdal

The ideal of quiet and of genteel retirement, in 1835, was found in Washington Square, where the Doctor built himself a handsome, modern, wide-fronted house, with a big balcony before the drawing-room windows, and a flight of marble steps ascending to a portal which was also faced with white marble. This structure, and many of its neighbours, which it exactly resembled, were supposed, forty years ago, to embody the last results of architectural science, and they remain to this day very solid and honourable dwellings. In front of them was the Square, containing a considerable quantity of inexpensive vegetation, enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its rural and accessible appearance; and round the corner was the more august precinct of the Fifth Avenue, taking its origin at this point with a spacious and confident air which already marked it for high destinies. I know not whether it is owing to the tenderness of early associations, but this portion of New York appears to many persons the most delectable. It has a kind of established repose which is not of frequent occurrence in other quarters of the long, shrill city; it has a riper, richer, more honourable look than any of the upper ramifications of the great longitudinal thoroughfare - the look of having had something of a social history. ~ Henry James

Overlooked in this ominous depiction might be our country's best- kept secret: in dealing with the most challenging issues of every gener- ation, resistance to duplicitous civil authority and its corporate enablers has defined our quintessential American story. ~ Jeff Biggers

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. ~ Douglas Adams

The dining-room was in the good taste of the period. It was very severe. There was a high dado of white wood and a green paper on which were etchings by Whistler in neat black frames. The green curtains with their peacock design, hung in straight lines, and the green carpet, in the pattern of which pale rabbits frolicked among leafy trees, suggested the influence of William Morris. There was blue delft on the chimneypiece. At that time there must have been five hundred dining-rooms in London decorated in exactly the same manner. It was chaste, artistic, and dull. ~ W. Somerset Maugham

One odd thing Yencken noticed was how much blonder the nation had become since he was last there. According to official statistics over 10 million packets of hair dye were sold in 1934 ~ Julia Boyd

Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. ~ Douglas Adams

To Europe she was America. To America she was the gateway to the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world. ~ H.G.Wells

The Bible, for all its riches, is not a document of social history. ~ Simon Schama

Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. ~ Thomas Sowell

Here is where it becomes clear that this kind of fine-grained genetic history is the flip side of the family-history coin. Although genealogy is not widely valued in academia, it meshes perfectly with, and helps explain, social history. These small stories about individual lives reveal the way that individual choices shape the biology and the history of whole populations. ~ Christine Kenneally

Witches is being sold as an account of the Belvoir scandals, but in truth, Tracy Borman has written a thorough and beautifully researched social history of the early 1600s, taking in everything from folk medicine to James I's sex life. ~ Bella Bathurst

The story of women in antiquity should be told now, not only because it is a legitimate aspect of social history, but because the past illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women. ... It is most significant to note the consistency with which some attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries. ~ Sarah B. Pomeroy

Even though it is black, black as Egypt's night, the customer is always right ~ Andrew Ewing

This is the war where we change. This is the trickster war. It's where we disappear, just like they desire us disappear. I spoke it you before: They wish us blank," he said, gesturing without thinking at Dr. Trefusis, who was the nearest exemplar of the white race. "They want us with no history and no memory. They want us empty as paper so they can write on us, so we ain't nothing but a price and an owner's name and a list of tasks. And that's what we'll give them. We'll give them your Nothing. We'll give them my William Williams and Henry Henry. We'll slip through and we'll change to who we must needs be and I will be all sly and have my delightful picaresque japes. But at the end of it, when it's over, I shall be one thing. I shall be one man, fixed, and not have to take no other name. I shall be one person steadily for some years."
"This is why we got to win ... If we ever wish to be one person, we got to win. ~ M T Anderson

Ultimately, of what possible social significance is it if a person likes to masturbate over a shoe? It may even be non-consensual, but since we do not ask permission of our shoes to wear them, it hardly seems necessary to obtain dispensation to come on them. ~ Gayle Rubin

The tea, once it arrived, had its customary effect - engendering comfort and loosening the tongue. That's tea for you, thought Sophronia, the great social lubricant. ~ Gail Carriger

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules. ~ Deborah Levy

For many people during many centuries, mankind's history before the coming of Christianity was the history of the Jews and what they recounted of the history of others. Both were written down in the books called the Old Testament, [the Torah] the sacred writings of the Jewish people ... They were the first to arrive at an abstract notion of God and to forbid his representation by images. No other people has produced a greater historical impact from such comparatively insignificant origins and resources ... ~ John Roberts

In history, and in evolution, progress is always a futile, Sisyphean struggle to stay in the same relative place by getting ever better at things. Cars move through the congested streets of London no faster than horse-drawn carriages did a century ago. Computers have no effect on productivity because people learn to complicate and repeat tasks that have been made easier. ~ Matt Ridley

Hard as it may sound, no god has saved anything or anyone in human history. It is the humans who have done so. ~ Abhijit Naskar

I am imprinted with the whole sense of European history, especially German history, going back to World War I, which really destroyed all the old values and culture. My grandparents had been reasonably well-off but they became quite poor, living in an attic apartment. ~ Lisel Mueller

Music has a bonding power, it's primal social cement ~ Oliver Sacks

When I look at founders and CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook and Brian Chesky at Airbnb and Sebastian Thrun at Udacity, these are companies that are creating extraordinary social good and extraordinary economic and educational empowerment, all within with context of a for-profit model. ~ Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

Allow me to sum it up this way; if the Church allows this secular humanistic "social gospel" into its hallowed halls, then it is putting its very existence at risk, for it will subject itself to the government. And the Church must be subject to Christ
not the government. ~ Curtis A. Chamberlain

How to read writers on writing: With respect, amusement, and skepticism. They will contradict one another-as they should-for each writer brings an individual history to the writing task. There is no single theology here. ~ Donald Murray

In all ages woman has been the source of all that is pure, unselfish, and heroic in the spirit and life of man.....poetry and fiction are based upon woman's love, and the movements of history are mainly due to the sentiments or ambitions she has inspired......there is no aspiration which any man here to-night entertains, no achievement he seeks to accomplish, no great and honorable ambition he desires to gratify, which is not directly related to either or both a mother or a wife. From the hearth-stone around which linger the recollections of our mother, from the fireside where our wife awaits us, come all the purity, all the hope, and all the courage with which we fight the battle of life. The man who is not thus inspired, who labors not so much to secure the applause of the world as the solid and more precious approval of his home, accomplishes little of good for others or of honor for himself. I close with the hope that each of us may always have near us:

'A perfect woman, nobly planned,
To warn, to comfort, and command,
And yet a spirit still, and bright
With something of an angel light. ~ Chauncey Mitchell DePew

The marvellous thing about writing, whether it be fiction or journalism, is that it is simultaneously the most intimate and the most anonymous of meetings between people. It is profoundly intimate in reaching into the psyche of another, at the same time as being devoid of social characteristics, cultural characteristics, economic characteristics. ~ Will Self

What makes a good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who'd rather write a good story. ~ Jim Bishop

Social conservatives seem to see a bigger threat to marriage from committed gay couples who want in on it than from straight ones who opt out of it. ~ Margaret Talbot

Here monogamy, there hetaerism and its most extreme form, prostitution. Hetaerism is as much a social institution as all others. It continues the old sexual freedom - for the benefit of the men. In reality not only permitted, but also assiduously practised by the ruling class, it is denounced only nominally. Still in practice this denunciation strikes by no means the men who indulge in it, but only the women. These are ostracised and cast out by society, in order to proclaim once more the fundamental law of unconditional male supremacy over the female sex. However, ~ Friedrich Engels

Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places. ~ Junius Williams

When I began to act, I was about 6 years old. Everything you learned, every period of history you studied, you did a play about it. ~ Marian Seldes

This disappearance, this annihilation is all a matter of appearances as seen through the eyes of the false self. The annihilation is only apparent, for the self being annihilated is itself only apparent. It is a self without God, that is, a self that can never exist. What is annihilated is our false self, our external self made absolute, the imposter, the mask (persona), the liar we think we are but are not. The annihilation therefore is not annihilation at all, for nothing real or genuine is annihilated. Rather, what is genuine is affirmed as our psychological, historical, social self and placed in its true relationship to God. All that is annihilated is the illusion of the self that cannot bear God's presence, save as an idol fabricated for the ego's own glorification. It is this "self" that is "annihilated" through God's merciful love. The annihilation is merciful for it, in fact, is the antithesis of annihilation. It is rather an obscure, inexplicable foretaste in faith of our final consummation as created persons. It is the mystery of the cross creatively at work in the foundations of consciousness, recreating our awareness that we might know God as he knows himself. ~ James Finley

I believe that the community's duty to education is, therefore, its paramount moral duty. By law and punishment, by social agitation and discussion, society can regulate and form itself in a more or less haphazard and chance way. But through education society can formulate its own purposes, can organize its own means and resources, and thus shape itself with definiteness and economy in the direction in which it wishes to move. ~ John Dewey

A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not. ~ Robert M. Pirsig

I saw the world from the stars' point of view, and it looked unbearably lonely. ~ Shaun David Hutchinson

Man is only a moral being because he lives in society, since morality consists in solidarity with the group, and varies according to that solidarity. Cause all social life to vanish, and moral life would vanish at the same time, having no object to cling to. ~ Emile Durkheim

Introversion and shyness are not synonymous. Introversion is a natural personality trait where we go inside ourselves to process our experiences. Shyness, on the other hand, is a condition marked by fear or extreme anxiety in social situations. ~ Adam S. McHugh

If the historian will be faithful to the photograph, the photograph will be faithful to history. ~ Beaumont Newhall

Sociologists keep the rationality hypothesis of the consumer away and replace it in the heart of social relations and strengths in which it is taken. ~ David Abikzir

I began waking up slowly into history, from which we do not emerge as from other nightmares. ~ Martha Cooley

Anti-Semitism and Fascism have a long, mysterious, bewildering, poisonous and vile history and it's not exclusive to the Germans. ~ Bill Nighy

Francis stared down at the Duchess of York's letter. He swallowed, then read aloud in a husky voice, "It was showed by John Sponer that King Richard, late mercifully reigning upon us, was through great treason piteously slain and murdered, to the great heaviness of this City."
As Margaret listened, the embittered grey eyes had softened, misted with sudden tears.
"My brother may lie in an untended grave," she said, "but he does not lack for an epitaph. ~ Sharon Kay Penman

To deny the reported six million (approximately) Jews who died, or the 11 million people in total, is to ignore all the eyewitness accounts from Holocaust survivors, the non-Jewish witnesses of the millions who died the open-air massacres around Europe, the concentration camp guards, Nazi officers who admitted to gassings and other related crimes immediately after WW2, and the universal agreement of all mainstream historians who have studied this historical event inside out – not to mention every single scientist who has ever analyzed forensic evidence retrieved from the Nazi genocide. Not even the most corrupt courtroom on Earth could ignore this much evidence – for collectively these confirmations of the Holocaust equate to irrefutable proof that the reported death toll is indeed correct. It is possibly the most well-documented crime of the 20th Century, but remember for religious extremists, Nazi apologists or other anti-Semites it would never matter how much evidence you put in front of them. They would always deny the Holocaust because to admit the event occurred would be to stop believing the Jews are inferior to them. It would also require such bigots to admit the very uncomfortable truth to themselves: that their 'own kind' did these despicable things to the Jewish people. ~ James Morcan

The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table, and deny the aggressor theirs. ~ Richard M. Nixon

The plays of children are nonsense, but very educative nonsense. So it is with the largest and solemnest things, with commerce, government, church, marriage, and so with the history of every man's bread, and the ways by which he is to come by it. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

Since sovereign franchise is the ultimate in human authority, we insure that all who wield it accept the ultimate in social responsibility - we require each person who wishes to exert control over the state to wager his own life - and lose it, if need be - to save the life of the state. The maximum responsibility a human can accept is thus equated to the ultimate authority a human can exert. ~ Robert A. Heinlein

Narrow behaviourist thinking
permeates political and social policy and medical practice, the
childrearing advice dispensed by "parenting experts" and academic
discourse. We keep trying to change people's behaviours without a full
understanding of how and why those behaviours arise. "Inner causes
are not the proper domain of psychology," writes Roy Wise, an expert
on the psychology of addiction, and a prominent investigator in the
National Institute on Drug Abuse in the U.S.A.3 This statement seems
astonishing, coming from a psychologist. In reality, there can be no
understanding of human beings, let alone of addicted human beings,
without looking at "inner causes," tricky as those causes can be to pin
down at times. Behaviours, especially compulsive behaviours, are
often the active representations of emotional states and of special
kinds of brain functioning.
As we have seen, the dominant emotional states and the brain
patterns of human beings are shaped by their early environment.
Throughout their lifetimes, they are in dynamic interaction with various
social and emotional milieus. If we are to help addicts, we must strive
to change not them but their environments. These are the only things
we can change. Transformation of the addict must come from within
and the best we can do is to encourage it. Fortunately, there is much
that we can do. ~ Gabor Mate

Throughout history, men have broken women's hearts in a particular way. They love them or half-love them and then grow weary and spend weeks and months extricating themselves soundlessly, pulling their tails back into their doorways, drying themselves off, and never calling again. Meanwhile, women wait. The more in love they are and the fewer options they have, the longer they wait, hoping that he will return with a smashed phone, with a smashed face, and say, I'm sorry, I was buried alive and the only thing I thought of was you, and feared that you would think I'd forsaken you when the truth is only that I lost your number, it was stolen from me by the men who buried me alive, and I've spent three years looking in phone books and now I have found you. I didn't disappear, everything I felt didn't just leave. You were right to know that would be cruel, unconscionable, impossible. Marry me. ~ Lisa Taddeo

The real turning point in human history is less apt to be the day the wheel is invented or Rome falls than the day a boy is born to a couple of hick Jews. ~ Frederick Buechner

All dreams of empire end because day breaks in the hearts of the slaves used to build it. ~ Luke Montgomery

It was said that one of them, either the actor or the history teacher, was superfluous in this world, but you weren't, you weren't superfluous, there is no duplicate of you to come and replace you at your mother's side, you were unique, just as every ordinary person is unique, truly unique. ~ Jose Saramago

Only in action can you fully realize the forces operative in social behavior. That is why I am an experimentalist. ~ Stanley Milgram

There were times, though, when the women came together on a partisan basis. [When we stopped] the privatization of Social Security during George Bush, we linked arms. ~ Barbara Mikulski