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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone spent his declining years trying to guess the answer to the Irish Question; unfortunately, whenever he was getting warm, the Irish secretly changed the Question.”

Trying Years Answers History Changed Humour Warm British Ministers Prime Prime Minister Gladstone

Author:W. C. Sellar

“How strangely is antiquity treated! To answer some purposes it is spoken of as the times of darkness and ignorance, and to answer others, it is put for the light of the world.”

World Light Purpose Answers History Darkness Ignorance Treated World History Antiquity Light Of The World

Book:Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution

Source: Rights of Man: Being an Answer to Mr. Burke's Attack on the French Revolution

“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”

Source: Occasions and protests

“To those who charge that liberalism has been tried and found wanting, I answer that the failure is not in the idea, but in the course of recent history. The New Deal was ended by World War II. The New Frontier was closed by Berlin and Cuba almost before it was opened. And the Great Society lost its greatness in the jungles of Indochina.”

“History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions; the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.”

Answers History Study Sociology Anthropology

Author:W. H. Auden

“The only interesting answers are those that destroy the questions.”

Answers Interesting History

Author:Susan Sontag

“We need open minds and open hearts when we wrestle with the past and ask questions of it, and the answers it will provide are in nobody's pocket... We should let nobody tell us that they know all that it contains, or try to prescribe or constrain in advance what it has to tell us.”

Knows Needs Should Trying Mind Heart Past Asks Answers History Pockets Open Mind Open Heart Constrain

Book:Faith of Our Fathers

Source: Faith of Our Fathers

“All history is an attempt to find pattern and meaning in a section of human experience, and every historian worthy of the name raises questions about man's ultimate destiny and the meaning of all history to which, as history, he can provide no answers. The answers belong to the realm of theology.”

Men Humans Names Answers Destiny History Ultimate Raises Patterns Worthy Theology Realms Historian Sections Human Experience Raises Questions

Author:G. B. Caird

“"The Universe repeats itself, with the possible exception of history." Of all earthly studies history is the only one that does not repeat itself. ... Astronomy repeats itself; botany repeats itself; trigonometry repeats itself; mechanics repeats itself; compound long division repeats itself. Every sum if worked out in the same way at any time will bring out the same answer. ... A great many moderns say that history is a science; if so it occupies a solitary and splendid elevation among the sciences; it is the only science the conclusions of which are always wrong.”