The highest condition of art is artlessness.
How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?
I believe that history is capable of anything. There exists no folly that men have not tried out.
Communists liked history very much. It just had to be the right history. They liked to remember it selectively.
In a world where meaning is often absent or imposed, reading offers a dialogue with ourselves, with society, with history, and with the dead.
All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.
It is a fact of history that those who seek to withdraw from its great experiments usually end up being overwhelmed by them.
The study of history lies at the foundation of all sound military conclusions and practice.
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?
It is not I who have been consigned to the bedroom of history.
In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.
In the present age when communication is so rapid, we should create a different tradition, traditions are created everyday. Five years now is like 100 years before. We are living in a society that has no history. There's no precedent for this kind of society so we can break the old patterns.
I sometimes lie awake at night and try to imagine what would be the best period in history to spend one's seventy-odd years.
History is nothing but a pack of tricks that we play upon the dead.
The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past. . . . The writing of history liberates us from history.
Never say more than is necessary.
Over the years, a lot of rappers - Lil' Wayne, Ice Cube - have used my name in their songs. I'm a real touchstone of history.
History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors and issues.
You’re probably wasting time on things like eating and sleeping. Cease that, and read all of philosophy and all of literature. Also art. Plus politics and a few other things. The history of everything.
History shows that when the church accommodates culture, it weakens it.