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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“History is but a confused heap of facts.”

Facts History Confused

Author:Lord Chesterfield

“A truly American sentiment recognizes the dignity of labor and the fact that honor lies in honest toil.”

Facts Political Lying History Honest Inspirational Life Honor Labor Dignity Patriotic Sentiments Sentimental Toil

Book:Addresses, State Papers and Letters

Source: Addresses, State Papers and Letters

“Scientific practice is above all a story-telling practice. ... Biology is inherently historical, and its form of discourse is inherently narrative. ... Biology as a way of knowing the world is kin to Romantic literature, with its discourse about organic form and function. Biology is the fiction appropriate to objects called organisms; biology fashions the facts "discovered" about organic beings.”

World Way Facts Stories Form Science Literature Fiction Knowledge Practice History Knowing Fashion Objects Accounts Function Historical Narrative Appropriate Biology Organisms Discourse

Author:Donna J. Haraway

“Geological facts being of an historical nature, all attempts to deduce a complete knowledge of them merely from their still, subsisting consequences, to the exclusion of unexceptionable testimony, must be deemed as absurd as that of deducing the history of ancient Rome solely from the medals or other monuments of antiquity it still exhibits, or the scattered ruins of its empire, to the exclusion of a Livy, a Sallust, or a Tacitus.”

Stills Facts Science Knowledge History Consequence Historical Ancient Absurd Observation Ruins Empires Rome Testimony Medal Monument Exhibits Antiquity Exclusion Geology Ancient Rome

Book:Geological essays

Source: Geological essays

“When the uncultured man sees a stone in the road it tells him no story other than the fact that he sees a stone ... The scientist looking at the same stone perhaps will stop, and with a hammer break it open, when the newly exposed faces of the rock will have written upon them a history that is as real to him as the printed page.”

Men Real Facts Stories Reality Faces Science Culture Break History Written Rocks Pages Stones Scientist Exposed Hammers Printed

Book:Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science

Source: Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science

“It isn't that you subordinate your ideas to the force of the facts in autobiography but that you construct a sequence of stories to bind up the facts with a persuasive hypothesis that unravels your history's meaning.”

Ideas Facts Stories Force History Autobiography Constructs Hypothesis Sequence Subordinates Persuasive

Book:The facts: a novelist's autobiography

Source: The facts: a novelist's autobiography

“A complete assemblage of the smallest facts of human history will tell in the end.”

Humans Ends Facts History Smallest Human History Assemblage

Author:J. B. Bury

“The search for causes must come after the collection of facts.”

Facts Causes History Collections

Author:Hippolyte Taine

“The Christian view that all intercourse outside marriage is immoral was, as we see in the above passages from St. Paul, based upon the view that all sexual intercourse, even within marriage, is regrettable. A view of this sort, which goes against biological facts, can only be regarded by sane people as a morbid aberration. The fact that it is embedded in Christian ethics has made Christianity throughout its whole history a force tending towards mental disorders and unwholesome views of life.”

“Historical chronology, human or geological, depends... upon comparable impersonal principles. If one scribes with a stylus on a plate of wet clay two marks, the second crossing the first, another person on examining these marks can tell unambiguously which was made first and which second, because the latter event irreversibly disturbs its predecessor. In virtue of the fact that most of the rocks of the earth contain imprints of a succession of such irreversible events, an unambiguous working out of the chronological sequence of these events becomes possible.”

“It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.”

People Ifs World Book Ideas Country Facts Might History Various Ironic Good Ideas History Books Countries Of The World

Author:Bill Vaughan

“To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”