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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten. ...What is interesting is brought forward as if it had been central and efficacious in the march of events, and harmonies are turned into causes. Kings and generals are endowed with motives appropriate to what the historian values in their actions; plans are imputed to them prophetic of their actual achievements, while the thoughts that really preoccupied them remain buried in absolute oblivion.”

IfsNeedsActionValuesCausesInterestingHistoryPlansWrittenEventsKingsAchievementAbsolutesHarmonyHistoricalPlanningMotiveAppropriateMarchBuriedHistorianOblivionProphetic
Book:The Life of Reason: Human Understanding
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“People often of masterful intelligence, trained usually in law or economics or perhaps in political science, who have led their governments into disastrous decisions and miscalculations because they have no awareness whatever of the historical background, the cultural universe, of the foreign societies with which they have to deal.”

PeopleGovernmentLawPoliticalUniverseDecisionDealsHistoryAwarenessEconomicsHistoricalBackgroundsPolitical ScienceIn-lawsMiscalculations
Author:Michael Howard
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“In historic events, the so-called great men are labels giving names to events, and like labels they have but the smallest connection with the event itself. Every act of theirs, which appears to them an act of their own will, is in an historical sense involuntary and is related to the whole course of history and predestined from eternity.”

MenGivingWholeCoursesNamesHistoryEventsGreatnessConnectionsEternityHistoricalLabelsRelatedGreat MenSmallestHistoricInvoluntaryPredestined
Author:Leo Tolstoy
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“As Karl Marx once noted: 'Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.' William Jennings Bryan and the Scopes trial was a tragedy. The creationists and intelligent design theorists are a farce.”

WorldFirstsFactsScienceHistoryDesignFirst TimeTragedyIntelligentAddHistoricalTrialsScopeRemarksTheoristsFarceIntelligent DesignHegelBryanHistorical FactsScopes Trial
Author:Michael Shermer
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“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.”

WorldWayFactsStoriesFormScienceLiteratureFictionKnowledgePracticeHistoryKnowingFashionObjectsAccountsFunctionHistoricalNarrativeAppropriateBiologyOrganismsDiscourse
Author:Donna J. Haraway
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“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.”

StillsFactsScienceKnowledgeHistoryConsequenceHistoricalAncientAbsurdObservationRuinsEmpiresRomeTestimonyMedalMonumentExhibitsAntiquityExclusionGeologyAncient Rome
Book:Geological essays
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“We don't know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don't understand our name at all, we don't know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”

IfsKnowsMomentsInspirationFunnyNamesUnderstandingHistoryBearsProudHumorousHistoricalBrilliantAncestorFidelityExalted
Author:Milan Kundera
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“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.”

IfsFirstsHumansPersonsMadeTwoFactsEarthSciencePrinciplesHistoryVirtueRocksEventsDependsMarkHistoricalWork OutLatterWetPlatesClaySequenceSuccessionCrossingsExaminingPredecessorsIrreversibleChronologyScribes
Author:M. King Hubbert
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“Africans and persons of African descent must assume the primary responsibility and leadership in historical research....if we are to continue to leave practically all important historical research and writing concerning the black race to the white man, then we must be prepared to accept, uncomplainingly, the white man's point of view.”

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Author:Chancellor Williams
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