“Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.”
“The colonists usually say that it was they who brought us into history: today we show that this is not so. They made us leave history, our history, to follow them, right at the back, to follow the progress of their history.”
What is life? A madness. What is life? An illusion, a shadow, a story. And the greatest good is little enough; for all life is a dream, and dreams themselves are only dreams.
It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.
To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?
The greatest tragedy in mankind's entire history may be the hijacking of morality by religion.
It is another story with curved lines. The song of the curved line is called happiness.
In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.
Indian high chiefs were frolicking freely with young Arawak beauties.... Barons and Marquis from the court of Louis XIV were playing leapfrog on the grass.... In the motley crowd, I also saw Simon Bolivar.... The time of masks had assembled three centuries of human history.
One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
History is rich with adventurous men, long on charisma, with a highly developed instinct for their own interests, who have pursued personal power - bypassing parliaments and constitutions, distributing favours to their minions, and conflating their own desires with the interests of the community.
Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.
History never really says goodbye. History says, 'See you later.
If the past has nothing to say to the present, history may go on sleeping undisturbed in the closet where the system keeps its old disguises.
The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art's audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.
The longer and more carefully we look at a funny story, the sadder it becomes.”
The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
Man is above all else mind, consciousness -- that is, he is a product of history, not of nature.
Without words, without writing and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity.
Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?
The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.
If history were taught in the form of stories, it would never be forgotten.
“History had a slow pulse; man counted in years, history in generations
Idlers do not make history: they suffer it
Providence conceals itself in the details of human affairs, but becomes unveiled in the generalities of history.
Poetry has its particular rules and precepts; and that history is governed by others directly opposite.
History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.
Revolutions are the locomotives of history.
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
The history of all previous societies has been the history of class struggles.
If there is one thing that the women and men of the late 20th century who have an awareness and enjoyment of history can be sure of, it is that Islam was not sent from Heaven to foster egotism and mediocrity.
The main thing is to make history, not to write it.
The history of thought may be summed up in these words: it is absurd by what it seeks and great by what it finds.
The whole earth is the tomb of heroic men and their story is not given only on stone over their clay but abides everywhere without visible symbol woven into the stuff of other mens lives.
There have been only rare moments in history where individual histories were able to run their course without wars or revolutions.
Each day is a little bit of history.
Make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games; they encourage it in some schools.
If history repeats itself, and the unexpected always happens, how incapable must Man be of learning from experience.
History is a cyclic poem written by time upon the memories of man.
History is Philosophy teaching by example.
In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.
“This story is true because I made it up.”
For most of history, Anonymous was a woman.
In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.
In history, the moments during which reason and reconciliation prevail are short and fleeting.