I wanted to be a poet when I was 20; I had no interest in fiction or biography and precious little interest in history, but those three elements in my life have become the most important.
Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance.
If you don't pay attention to history, you're destined to repeat it.
But in almost every province of the Roman world, an army of fanatics, without authority and without discipline, invaded the peaceful inhabitants; and the ruin of the fairest structures of antiquity still displays the ravages of those barbarians who alone had time and inclination to execute such laborious destruction.
We can be creative and generate new breakthroughs, if we're willing to work with ideas from the pool of history - both distant and more recent - despite the potential for our experiments to fail.
See where Congress passed a two billion dollar bill to relieve bankers' mistakes. You can always count on us helping those who have lost part of their fortune, but our whole history records nary a case where the loan was for the man who had absolutely nothing. Our theory is to help only those who can get along, even if they don't get a loan.
I just feel like history is very much alive and important and I don't, you know, I can't worry about whether people get it or not, per se.
A mind devoid of prepossessions is likely to be devoid of all mental furniture. And the historian who thinks that he can clean his mind as he would a slate with a wet sponge, is ignorant of the simplest facts of mental life.
Conventionally, one looks at history as something of the past. But after Einstein, who knows what is in the past and what is in the present?
History sometimes acts as madly as heredity, and her most unpredictable performances are often her most glorious.
For most of our history, no one dared to tell Americans, you don't build that.
I have always said to young artists that scholastic training and the studying of art history are crucial to fully developing as an artist.
How few women have any history after the age of thirty!
A crucial difference between lite libertarians and the right kind is that to the former, the idea of liberty is propositional - a deracinated principle, unmoored from the realities of history, hierarchy, biology, tradition, culture, values. Conversely, the paleolibertarian grasps that ordered liberty has a civilizational dimension, stripped of which the libertarian non-aggression axiom, by which we all must live, cannot endure.
To know the truth of history is to realize its ultimate myth and its inevitable ambiguity.
I am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.
History unravels; circumstances, following their natural inclination, prefer to remain ravelled.
Parties on the back of Parties, at war with the world and with each other.
EMBRACING THE EXISTING Japanese perspective on urban history and context
History isn't really about the past - settling old scores. It's about defining the present and who we are.