Speculative History Quotes

I like the idea of a big caesura between the narratives, a space which readers can fill in with their own speculative history. ~ Jonathan Coe

it might seem advisable to prove that the haunt of the walrus was known to the ancient chinese writers who have furnished accounts of america, but it is unnecessary to do this, seeing that the phenomenon of the ten suns, which is only visible at the arctic circle, is referred to in the ancient books. ~ Alexander McAllan

One person's actions can alter the course of history, and a political or military mischance can touch off a catastrophic reaction that has repercussions over centuries. ~ Timothy Venning

Of course, it has never paid much. ~ Molly Ivins

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses, and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history. ~ Pierre Bayle

Over the centuries, this interpretation and reinterpretation creates a long chain connecting a writer to all future readers- who frequently read each other as well as the original. Virginia Woolf had a beautiful vision of generations interlinked in this way: of how "minds are threaded together- how any live mind is of the very same stuff as Plato's & Euripides ... It is this common mind that binds the whole world together; & all the world is mind." This capacity for living on through readers' inner worlds over long periods of history is what makes a book like the 'Essays' a true classic. As it is reborn differently in each mind, it also brings those minds together. ~ Sarah Bakewell

The world has experienced a revival of an old faith in the everlasting moral force of justice. At no time in history has there been a more important Conference, or a more necessary meeting, than this one in San Francisco, which you are opening today. ~ Harry S. Truman

The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes. ~ Edward W. Said

It's nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it's the weirdos who care the most. ~ Chuck Klosterman

The moon is a satellite that was constructed. It was built and anchored outside Earth's atmosphere as a mediating and monitoring device, a supercomputer or eye in the sky. It affects all life forms on this planet, beyond what you can currently grasp. In your history there are references to two moons around earth ... ~ Barbara Marciniak

The moment somebody's a president and you call him "Mr. President," (the person represents) our culture, our history, our sense as our nation. ~ Rahm Emanuel

I think it's one of my favourite theatres ever, so quirky and wonderful and steeped in history. The space is wonderful and the acoustics are brilliant. ~ Louise Jameson

Subsequently, the Japanese people experienced a variety of vicissitudes and were involved in international disputes, eventually, for the first time in their history, experiencing the horrors of modern warfare on their own soil during World War II. ~ Eisaku Sato

Despite our founding principles and the many ways our constitution has protected individual liberties, we do, let's admit it, have a long history of shutting people out
african americans, women, gays and lesbians, people with disabilities
and throughout our history, we have found too many ways to divide and exclude people from their ownership of the law and protection under the law. ~ Hillary Clinton

Did a few poor souls die because of the Big Dig? Son, a hundred men died building the Hoover Dam. A thousand men died building the Erie Canal. Four hundred Chinamen died building the transcontinental railroad. How about the Panama Canal? One of the greatest engineering feats in history? Thirty thousand men died building it. Ambitious projects always cost lives, son. That's the truth. Have you ever visited the great pyramids of Giza? ~ Joseph Finder

Mary sat on a bench in the park. It was the middle of the night and she was alone and she felt at peace. She leaned back and looked upward. The sky was endless and expansive and the stars stretched on forever. It made her feel very small but it also made her feel very important. Of all of the things that might have ever had the chance to exist in the history of the universe, she had the privilege of being one of them. A living, thinking, feeling being, with the ability to control her own destiny.
As wondrous and expansive as stars and the entire universe were, none of them had this power. None of them had any control. And yet she felt humbled to be a part of it at all. It felt like a trade-off. In this life you could only be one or the other: wondrous and expansive or small and in control. ~ Olivia Fuller

A study of the history of wages back through the years indicates clearly that when the cost-of-living rises appreciably wages have shortly been adjusted upward also. ~ Charles E. Wilson

When I'm standing in the middle of the salt flats, where you swear that the pupils of your eyes have turned white because of the searing heat that is rising from the desert, I think of my childhood, I think of my mother, my father, my grandparents; I think of the history that we hold there and it is beautiful to me. But it is both a blessing and a burden to be rooted in place. It's recognizing the pattern of things, almost feeling a place before you even see it. In Southern Utah, on the Colorado plateau where canyon walls rise upward like praying hands, that is a holy place to me. ~ Terry Tempest Williams

Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral? ~ Raymond Geuss

This is completely unacceptable. Your investigative skills are getting rusty, Angie. You usually have a guy's entire life history memorized within the first ten minutes of him showing up on your hot guy radar, and all you know about this one is his first name? ~ C.J. Anaya

The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities. ~ Alfred North Whitehead

Television and film are our libraries now. Our history books. ~ David Strathairn

We live in a time where there's a great deal of navel-gazing with the devices that we have that occupy so much of our time ... many subjects of history are lost. ~ Chin Han

As I see it today, Hitler and Goebbels were in fact molded by the mob itself, guided by its yearnings and its daydreams. Of course, Goebbels and Hitler knew how to penetrate through to the instincts of their audiences; but in the deeper sense they derived their whole existence from these audiences. Certainly the masses roared to the beat set by Hitler's and Goebbels' baton; yet they were not the true conductors. The mob determined the theme. To compensate for misery, insecurity, unemployment, and hopelessness, this anonymous assemblage wallowed for hours at a time in obsessions, savagery and license. The personal unhappiness caused by the breakdown of the economy was replaced by a frenzy that demanded victims. By lashing out at their opponents and vilifying the Jews, they gave expression and direction to fierce primal passions. ~ Albert Speer

Honour, in the Republic, had never been a goal in itself, only a means to an infinite end. And what was true of her citizens, naturally, was also true of Rome herself. For the generation that had lived through the civil wars, this was the consolation history gave them. Out of calamity could come greatness. Out of dispossession could come the renewal of a civilised order. ~ Tom Holland

The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins. ~ Henry David Thoreau

History resembles a guest list in that sense of the invited and the gatecrashers: the people for whom we have been waiting, and those whose presence takes us unawares. ~ Sarah Churchwell

Christians have ... identified their opponents, whether Jews, pagans, or heretics, with forces of evil, and so with Satan ... Nor have things improved since. The blood-soaked history of persecution, torture, murder, and destruction perpetrated in the name of religion is difficult to grasp, let alohne summarize, from the slaughter of Christians to the Crusades to the Inquisitiion to the Reformation to the European witchcraze to colonialization to today's bitter coflict in the Middle East. ~ Elaine Pagels

...I do write books that are female oriented. In my books, the female characters are always searching for something and they often find it, and what they find is themselves and their own strength. I want girls to understand there has been a long history of strong women... Women have always been oppressed but managed to see their own way, and there is a long tradition of females doing what they want to do, and that's what girls can do. They can have selves of their own, a definition of themselves.'" ~Virginia Hamilton in Shireen Dodson's the Mother-Daughter Book Club ~ Shireen Dodson

I owe my nurture to evangelicalism. The evangelical wins hands down in the history of the church when it comes to nurturing a biblically literate laity. When we think of evangelism, evangelicals are the most resourceful, the most intrepid, and the most creative. But evangelicals themselves would say that they have never come to grips with what the whole mystery of the church is. ~ Thomas Howard, 3rd Duke Of Norfolk

in the pages of the history of the great. Her entire life ~ Napoleon Hill

Official history is a matter of believing murderers on their own word. ~ Simone Weil

Our true history is scarcely ever deciphered by others. The chief part of the drama is a monologue, or rather an intimate debate between God, our conscience, and ourselves. Tears, grieves, depressions, disappointments, irritations, good and evil thoughts, decisions, uncertainties, deliberations
all these belong to our secret, and are almost all incommunicable and intransmissible, even when we try to speak of them, and even when we write them down. ~ Henri Frederic Amiel

The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also so absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history. Rage can only with difficulty, and never entirely, be brought under the domination of the intelligence and is therefore not susceptible to any arguments whatever. ~ James Baldwin

Don't make a fuss about a world war. At most, people die ... Half the population wiped out - this happened quite a few times in Chinese history ... It's best if half the population is left, next best one-third ... ~ Mao Zedong

If you go back in American history, oysters were the food of poor people. New York was filled with oyster saloons in the 1800s. ~ Ruth Reichl

History narrates stories about great men from the past,write your story now and make history ~ Mohammed Sekouty

Mourning with no end, and a sense that I had lost everything - my child, my mother's love and protection, my father's love and protection, the life I had once imagined for myself - hollowed me out. I floated every day alone and disconnected, and could not find comfort or release. I understood clearly that my history had harmed me, had cut me off from the normal connections between people. Every day for five years I had been afraid of this disconnection, feeling the possibility of perfect detachment within my reach, like a river running alongside, inviting me to step into its current. ~ Meredith Hall

When the history of this period is written, [William Jennings] Bryan will stand out as one of the most remarkable men of his generation and one of the biggest political men of our country. ~ William Howard Taft

In history people dressed much better than we do today. ~ Vivienne Westwood

The Congress of the United States, in recognition of the unique contribution of the Bible in shaping the history and character of this Nation, and so many of its citizens, has by Senate Joint Resolution 165 authorized and requested the President to designate the year 1983 as the 'Year of the Bible.' ~ Ronald Reagan