Yay History Quotes

I told her that my happy yellow teapot has a kinky backstory involving a nineteenth-century vegetarian sex cult in upstate New York whose members lived for three decades as self-proclaimed "Bible communists" before incorporating into the biggest supplier of dinnerware to the American food-service industry, not to mention harboring their most infamous resident, an irritating young maniac who, years after he moved away, was hanged for assassinating President Garfield. ~ Sarah Vowell

Greece's history in the drachma was an up-and-down history, a roller coaster. ~ George Papandreou

< ... > many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation. ~ David Brion Davis

Until comparatively recently in its history, Maycomb County was so cut off from the rest of the nation that some of its citizens, unaware of the South's political predilections over the past ninety years, still voted Republican. ~ Harper Lee

There is no doubt in my mind when history was written, the final page will say: Victory was achieved by the United States of America for the good of the world. ~ George W. Bush

I think that in our earlier history
the Gettysburg Address or something
there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it. ~ Marilynne Robinson

The displacement of class politics by identity politics has been very confusing to older Marxists, who for many years clung to the old industrial working class as their preferred category of the underprivileged. They tried to explain this shift in terms of what Ernest Gellner labeled the "Wrong Address Theory": "Just as extreme Shi'ite Muslims hold that Archangel Gabriel made a mistake, delivering the Message to Mohamed when it was intended for Ali, so Marxists basically like to think that the spirit of history or human consciousness made a terrible boob. The awakening message was intended for classes, but by some terrible postal error was delivered to nations. ~ Francis Fukuyama

The academic mind can eat away the very basis of its own assurance ... produce contortions when it tries to bend over backward ... allow itself to be dismayed by the picture it has created of relentless historical process. ~ Herbert Butterfield

The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology. ~ Michael J. Findley

Here's a secret intel bulletin for all y'all who've never left Yoknapatawpha County and imagine the United States is constantly on the precipice of enemy invasion - the only way this country is ever going to surrender its liberty to a foreign power is if it keeps electing corrupt officials who auction it away to multinational corporations and overseas government interests in exactly the fashion that southern star chambers have been doing to their own people throughout their entire dyspeptic history. ~ Chuck Thompson

I have no restrictions, no limits, no musical history to live with. ~ Bill Wyman

The world at large is less inequitable today than at any time in history. Number of people in abject poverty, as a percentage, is at all-time low. ~ Bill Gates

Jerry Orbach was the first person to take me to the Friars Club. It's a beautiful building, and you walk into these halls of comedic history and meet these old cats who could tell you a million stories about how things went down in New York City. ~ Jesse L. Martin

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

The writer of history, I believe, has a number of duties vis-à-vis the reader, if he wants to keep him reading. The first is to distill. He must do the preliminary work for the reader, assemble the information, make sense of it, select the essential, discard the irrelevant- above all, discard the irrelevant - and put the rest together so that it forms a developing dramatic narrative. Narrative, it has been said , is the lifeblood of history. To offer a mass of undigested facts, of names not identified and places not located, is of no use to the reader and is simple laziness on the part of the author, or pedantry to show how much he has read. ~ Barbara W. Tuchman

Facet of existence that only a few hundred in history have glimpsed, but so what? I could hardly tell ~ David Mitchell

The Federal Reserve System had been established to prevent what actually happened. It was set up to avoid a situation in which you would have to close down banks, in which you would have a banking crisis. And yet, under the Federal Reserve system, you had the worst banking crisis in the history of the United States ~ Alan Ebenstein

Some women's faces are, in their brightness, a prophecy; and some, in their sadness, a history. ~ Charles Dickens

Thus much of our Western thinking is not scientific and objective but is orientated through a one-eyed perspective which reflects the prejudiced values of the West, and which necessarily prevents the enquirer from seeing the full picture. This is equivalent to what Blaut calls 'Eurocentric tunnel history'.32 What happens, then, when we view the world through a more inclusive two-eyed perspective? ~ John M. Hobson

All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State ... For Truth is the unity of the universal and subjective will; and the Universal is to be found in the State, in its laws, its universal and rational arrangements. The State is the Divine Idea as it exists on earth. We have in it, therefore, the object of history in a more definite shape than before; that in which Freedom obtains objectivity. ~ Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Some among the Armenians in the diaspora would never want the Turks to recognize the genocide. If they do so, they'll pull the rug out from under our feet and take the strongest bond that unites us. Just like the Turks have been in the habit of denying their wrongdoing, the Armenians have been in the habit of savoring the cocoon of victim hood. Apparently, there are some old habits that need to be changes on both sides. Baron Baghdassarian ~ Elif Shafak

History has scarcely deigned to notice [Libius Severus's] birth, his elevation, his character, or his death. ~ Edward Gibbon

Zero dwells at the juxtaposition of quantum mechanics and relativity; zero lives where the two theories meet, and zero causes the two theories to clash. A black hole is a zero in the equations of general relativity; the energy of the vacuum is a zero in the mathematics of quantum theory. The big bang, the most puzzling event in the history of the universe, is a zero in both theories. The universe came from nothing-and both theories break down when they try to explain the origin of the cosmos. ~ Charles Seife

History, in illuminating the past, illuminates the present, and in illuminating the present, illuminates the future. ~ Benjamin Cardozo

Albert Schweitzer, a century or more ago, used another strong image. Jesus, he said, was like a man convinced the wheel of history was going to turn in the opposite direction. He waited for this to happen, but it didn't. Then he threw himself upon the wheel, and it crushed him - but it did indeed start to turn in the other direction. ~ N. T. Wright

I suggest that the Western impact, at least in nineteenth-century China, was overstated (and misstated) by an earlier generation of American historians. An especially egregious example of this, I argue, was American treatment of the Opium War, the objective importance of which was not nearly so great as we - and an almost unanimous corps of Chinese historians - have imagined. ~ Paul A. Cohen

Never before in history had the world actually believed in the equality of man. ~ Peter Marshall

The long history of this idea before Kant made it the basis of his Critique of Judgment shows that the concept of taste was originally more a moral than an aesthetic idea. ~ Hans-Georg Gadamer

It's the 21st century. It's untenable to suggest that women had no significance and no interest and that just because they didn't vote they had no relevance to the course of our history. ~ Kate Williams

We know from our own history that democratic institutions take decades to mature, and we know from past conflicts that freedom is not free. ~ Jim DeMint

Inthehistorian'sview biography isa kindoffrogspawn it takes ten thousand biographies to make one small history. ~ Michael Holroyd

Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer. ~ Wynton Marsalis

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