Historical Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

In public buildings set aside for the care and maintenance of the goods of the middle ages, a staff of civil service art attendants praise all the dead, irrelevant scribblings and scrawlings that, at best, have only historical interest for idiots and layabouts.

It is historical continuity that maintains most assumptions,
not repeated assessment of their validity.

Sometimes I have the feeling that you are not quite aware--and this honors you--of the historical greatness of your position, that you think too modestly about yourself. Everything you do is destined to be of historic significance. One day, your letters, your decisions, will belong to all mankind, like those of Wagner and Brahms.

I don't think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.

Denise Levertov

One does not realize the historical sensation as a re-experiencing, but as an understanding that is closely related to the understanding of music, or rather of the world by means of music.

And all times are one time, and all those dead in the past never lived before our definition gives them life, and out of the shadow their eyes implore us. That is what all of us historical researchers believe. And we love truth.

Robert Penn Warren

Intellectual neutrality is not possible in a historical world of exploitation and oppression.

Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Just as our historical beginnings are utterly mysterious-why are we born? why when and as we are?-so too are the beginnings of works of art and of "artists.

Joyce Carol Oates

The felt unreliability of human experience brought about by the inhuman acceleration of historical change has led every sensitive modern mind to the recording of some kind of nausea, of intellectual vertigo.

How does photography serve to legitimate and normalize existing power relationships?... How is historical and social memory preserved, transformed, restricted and obliterated by photographs?

If you can't have an experiment, do the best you can with whatever data you can gather, but do be very skeptical of historical data and subject them to all the logical tests you can think of.

Robert Hooke (mathematician)

Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

Before we can build a stable civilization worthy of humanity as a whole, it is necessary that each historical civilization should become conscious of its limitations and it's unworthiness to become the ideal civilization of the world.

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

Individualism as a philosophic value cannot change the historical fact of group discrimination and group conditioning, both of which severely limit the opportunities facing any particular individual in a disadvantaged group.

Given the ambiguity of religious texts and teachings, the mixed historical record, and the empirical evidence, it would be foolhardy to assert that religious faith necessarily upholds democratic values.

Kenneth D. Wald

Most of my professional work has been in these areas - as a historical critic, as a literary critic. I've done very little in the history of interpretation [as Elie Wiesel has]. I've been interested in it, but I have not contributed to that field, really.

The fourth landing of the Columbia is the historical equivalent of the driving of the golden spike which completed the first transcontinental railroad. It marks our entrance into a new era.

If the religious spirit be ever mentioned in any historical narration, we are sure to meet afterwards with a detail of the miseries which attend it. And no period of time can be happier or more prosperous, than those in which it is never regarded or heard of.

There are some varieties of fiction that I never touch - mystery stories, for instance, which I abhor, and historical novels. I also detest the so-called "powerful" novel - full of commonplace obscenities and torrents of dialog.

Vladimir Nabokov

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

John Stuart Mill

Essentially only one thing in life interests us: our psychical constitution, the mechanism of which was and is wrapped in darkness. All human resources, art, religion, literature, philosophy and historical sciences, all of them join in bringing light in this darkness.

And finally, it was Deuteronomy that brought about the historical result of Josiah's reformation.

Julius Wellhausen

What worries some people about consumption (and I confess at the outset to be one of these ambivalent creatures, fat but troubled in paradise) is that the affluent, technologically advanced West seems more and more focused not on consuming to live but living to consume. The problem with consumption, and the consumer capitalism that has pushed it to feverish historical extremes, is that it has become so all-consuming.

Western civilization, because of fortuitous historical circumstances, has spread itself more widely than any other local group that has so far been known.