Historical Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The leadership has failed. Even so, the leadership can and must be recreated from the masses and out of the masses. The masses are the decisive element, they are the rock on which the final victory of the revolution will be built. The masses were on the heights; they have developed this 'defeat' into one of the historical defeats which are the pride and strength of international socialism. And that is why the future victory will bloom from this 'defeat'.
'Order reigns in Berlin!' You stupid henchmen! Your 'order' is built on sand. Tomorrow the revolution will already 'raise itself with a rattle' and announce with fanfare, to your terror: I was, I am, I will be!

True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and through them, all the rest.

Maurice Merleau-Ponty

They become liberated spaces that can be occupied. A rich indetermination gives them, by means of a semantic rarefaction, the function of articulating a second, poetic geography on top of the geography of the literal, forbidden or permitted meaning. They insinuate other routes into the functionalist and historical order of movement. Walking follows them: 'I fill this great empty space with a beautiful name.'

Michel de Certeau

The bases for historical knowledge are not empirical facts but written texts, even if these texts masquerade in the guise of wars or revolutions.

Harlem is the black world's key community for historical, political, economic, cultural and/or ethnic reasons.

The evolution of science is not a movement in an intellectual vacuum; rather it is both an expression and a driving force of the historical process.

Ludwig von Bertalanffy

Most people don't like to talk about violent historical death.

Mathematizing may well be a creative activity of man, like language or music, of primary originality, whose historical decisions defy complete objective rationalizations.

There is but one way to understand the continuous growth of the human mind and to gain a firm grasp of what it has achieved in any department of knowledge - that is to watch its historical development.

The art in photography is literary art before it is anything else: its triumphs and monuments are historical, anecdotal, reportorial, observational before they are purely pictorial... The photograph has to tell a story if it is to work as art.

Clement Greenberg

It certainly feels to me that we are discovering something real in physics, something that is what it is without any regard to the social and historical conditions that allowed us to discover it.

Steven Weinberg

The sciences which take socio-historical reality as their subject matter are seeking, more intensively than ever before, their systematic relations to one another and to their foundation.

Wilhelm Dilthey

If all the evidence is weighed carefully and fairly, it is indeed justifiable, according to the canons of historical research, to conclude that the sepulcher of Joseph of Arimathea, in which Jesus was buried, was actually empty on the morning of the first Easter. And no shred of evidence has yet been discovered in literary sources, epigraphy, or archaeology that would disprove this statement.

When you look on one of your contemporary 'good copies' of historical remains, ask yourself the question: Not what style, but in what civilization is this building? And the absurdity, vulgarity, anachronism and solecism of the modern structure will be revealed to you in a most startling fashion.

Most expositions of Aristotle's doctrines, when they have not been dictated by a spirit of virulent detraction, or unsympathetic indifference, have carefully suppressed all, or nearly all, the absurdities, and only retained what seemed plausible and consistent. But in this procedure their historical significance disappears.

George Henry Lewes

Coconut oil has been described as the World's Healthiest Dietary Oil. There is a mountain of historical evidence and medical research to verify this fact

The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.

Thomas Henry Huxley

Our yearning for democracy is accompanied by a no less profound yearning for peace. And the media also faced the task of historical engineering to establish this required truth. We therefore have phenomena called 'peace missions' and the 'peace process'. These are terms that apply to whatever the United States happens to be doing or advocating at some moment... in short, 'War is Peace'.

The amazing thing since so many variables enter into historical judgments, is not that historians disagree but that they agree as often as they do.

Louis Moreau Gottschalk

Historical investigation has for its aim to fix the order and character of events throughout past time and in all places. The task is frankly superhuman.

George Santayana

My remembrance of the past is a novel I am constantly recomposing; and it would not be a historical novel, but sheer fiction, if the material events which mark and ballast my career had not their public dates and characters scientifically discoverable.

George Santayana

When I write I have no loyalty except to historical truth as I see it and care no more about British achievements and mistakes than any other.

A. J. P. Taylor

After all, that's why we read historical fiction-to be transported to another time, and to be astonished at ancient people's lives and traditions, just as they would probably be astonished at ours.

The scientific spirit, when applied to historical research, is - like chemistry applied to agriculture - valuable, but good crops have been and can be grown without it.

The historical data support one conclusion with unusual force: To invest with success, you must be a long-term investor.