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History Quotes

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History Quotes

“The six thousand years of human history form but a portion of the geologic day that is passing over us: they do not extend into the yesterday of the globe, far less touch the myriads of ages spread out beyond.”

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Book:An Autobiography: My Schools and Schoolmasters; Or, The Story of My Education
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“[Theodore Roosevelt] was a naturalist on the broadest grounds, uniting much technical knowledge with knowledge of the daily lives and habits of all forms of wild life. He probably knew tenfold more natural history than all the presidents who had preceded him, and, I think one is safe in saying, more human history also.”

ThinkingHumansFormSciencePresidentNaturalKnowledgeHistoryHabitSafeDaily LifeHuman HistoryNaturalistUnitingNatural HistoryTheodoreTechnical KnowledgeWild Life
Author:John Burroughs
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“Indeed, I suspect that the changes that have taken place during the last century in the average man's fundamental beliefs, in his philosophy, in his conception of religion, in his whole world outlook, are greater than the changes that occurred during the preceding four thousand years all put together.”

MenWorldYearsHumansPhilosophyWholeDreamTogetherLastsScienceBeliefHistoryTakenGreaterFourCenturyThousandConceptsAccountsFundamentalsAverageWhole WorldHuman LifeMy TimeSuspectsApplicationThousand YearsOutlookAverage Man
Author:Robert Andrews Millikan
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“How strange it would be if the final theory were to be discovered in our lifetimes! The discovery of the final laws of nature will mark a discontinuity in human intellectual history, the sharpest that has occurred since the beginning of modern science in the seventeenth century. Can we now imagine what that would be like?”

IfsHumansWould BeLawScienceHistoryImagineModernCenturyStrangeTheoryIntellectualDiscoveryMarkLifetimeFinalsLaws Of NatureModern ScienceDiscontinuity
Book:Dreams of a Final Theory
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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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“Combining in our survey then, the whole range of deposits from the most recent to the most ancient group, how striking a succession do they present:- so various yet so uniform-so vast yet so connected. In thus tracing back to the most remote periods in the physical history of our continents, one system of operations, as the means by which many complex formations have been successively produced, the mind becomes impressed with the singleness of nature's laws; and in this respect, at least, geology is hardly inferior in simplicity to astronomy.”

MindMeanHas BeensWholeLawScienceNatureHistoryGroupsPeriodsComplexesSimplicityAncientProductionsVariousConnectedAstronomyRangeOperationsContinentsUniformsInferiorsImpressedFormationSuccessionSurveysGeologyCombiningDepositsSinglenessTracing
Book:The silurian system, founded on geological researches in the counties of Salop, Hereford etc
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“Nothing could have been worse for the development of my mind than Dr. Butler's school, as it was strictly classical, nothing else being taught, except a little ancient geography and history. The school as a means of education to me was simply a blank. During my whole life I have been singularly incapable of mastering any language. Especial attention was paid to versemaking, and this I could never do well. I had many friends, and got together a good collection of old verses, which by patching together, sometimes aided by other boys, I could work into any subject.”

MindWellsMeanLittlesHas BeensSometimesWholeSchoolTogetherScienceLanguageAttentionBoysHistoryTeachingSubjectsTaughtDevelopmentPaidAncientWhole LifeCollectionsVersesBlankIncapableDrsCould Have BeenGeographyOf My MindMany FriendsButlersGeography And History
Book:Life and Letters of Charles Darwin: the Evolution
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“The earth's becoming at a particular period the residence of human beings, was an era in the moral, not in the physical world, that our study and contemplation of the earth, and the laws which govern its animate productions, ought no more to be considered in the light of a disturbance or deviation from the system, than the discovery of the satellites of Jupiter should be regarded as a physical event in the history of those heavenly bodies, however influential they may have become from that time in advancing the progress of sound philosophy among men.”

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Book:Principles of Geology
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“Among the older records, we find chapter after chapter of which we can read the characters, and make out their meaning: and as we approach the period of man's creation, our book becomes more clear, and nature seems to speak to us in language so like our own, that we easily comprehend it. But just as we begin to enter on the history of physical changes going on before our eyes, and in which we ourselves bear a part, our chronicle seems to fail us-a leaf has been torn out from nature's record, and the succession of events is almost hidden from our eyes.”

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Book:A complete guide to the Lakes, comprising minute directions for the tourist, with mr. Wordsworth's Description of the scenery of the country, &c. and Three letters upon the geology of the Lake district, by prof. Sedgwick
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“To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.”

LooksRealityScienceNatureNaturalHistoryEventsScientistIntelligentMereObservationContemplationPhenomenonHistorianDefectiveSpectacles
Author:Robin G. Collingwood
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“[Decoding the human genome sequence] is the most significant undertaking that we have mounted so far in an organized way in all of science. I believe that reading our blueprints, cataloguing our own instruction book, will be judged by history as more significant than even splitting the atom or going to the moon.”

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Author:Francis Collins
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“Geology is rapidly taking its place as an introduction to the higher history of man. If the author has sought to exalt a favorite science, it has been with the desire that man-in whom geological history had its consummation, the prophecies of the successive ages their fulfilment-might better comprehend his own nobility and the true purpose of his existence.”

IfsMenHas BeensMightAgeScienceDesirePurposeExistenceHistoryHigherProphecyNobilityIntroductionGeologyFulfilmentTrue Purpose
Book:Manual of Geology: Treating of the Principles of the Science, with Special Reference to American Geological History, for the Use of Colleges, Academies, and Schools of Science
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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.”

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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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“Some years ago John Kenneth Galbraith wrote in an essay on his efforts at writing a history of economics: 'As one approaches the present, one is filled with a sense of hopelessness; in a year and possibly even a month, there is now more economic comment in the supposedly serious literature than survives from the whole of the thousand years commonly denominated as the Middle Ages ... anyone who claims to be familiar with it all is a confessing liar.' I believe that all physicists would subscribe to the same sentiments regarding their own professional literature. I do at any rate.”

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Author:Abraham Pais
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“In the expressions we adopt to prescribe physical phenomena we necessarily hover between two extremes. We either have to choose a word which implies more than we can prove, or we have to use vague and general terms which hide the essential point, instead of bringing it out. The history of electrical theories furnishes a good example.”

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Author:Arthur Schuster
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“[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the "school" to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of his investigations. Hans Cloos called this way of interrogation "the dialogue with the earth," "das Gesprach mit der Erde."”

IfsWayHandsSchoolEarthScienceHistoryMaterialsDependsRemainsSilentDialogueInvestigationObjectivityGeologyInterrogationMitGeologist
Author:Reinout Willem van Bemmelen
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“The alchemists of past centuries tried hard to make the elixir of life: ... Those efforts were in vain; it is not in our power to obtain the experiences and the views of the future by prolonging our lives forward in this direction. However, it is well possible in a certain sense to prolong our lives backwards by acquiring the experiences of those who existed before us and by learning to know their views as well as if we were their contemporaries. The means for doing this is also an elixir of life.”

IfsKnowsLifeWellsMeanHardPastScienceCertainViewsEffortHistoryOur LivesCenturyVainBackwardsAlchemistElixirProlongingElixir Of Life
Author:Hermann Franz Moritz Kopp
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“The primitive history of the species is all the more fully retained in its germ-history in proportion as the series of embryonic forms traversed is longer; and it is more accurately retained the less the mode of life of the recent forms differs from that of the earlier, and the less the peculiarities of the several embryonic states must be regarded as transferred from a later to an earlier period of life, or as acquired independently.”

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Author:Fritz Muller
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“The more I study the things of the mind the more mathematical I find them. In them as in mathematics it is a question of quantities; they must be treated with precision. I have never had more satisfaction than in proving this in the realms of art, politics and history.”

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Book:Life and Letters of H. Taine: 1870-1892
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“If a little less time was devoted to the translation of letters by Julius Caesar describing Britain 2000 years ago and a little more time was spent on teaching children how to describe (in simple modern English) the method whereby ethylene was converted into polythene in 1933 in the ICI laboratories at Northwich, and to discussing the enormous social changes which have resulted from this discovery, then I believe that we should be training future leaders in this country to face the world of tomorrow far more effectively than we are at the present time.”

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Author:Ronald Sydney Nyholm
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“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.”

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Book:Nature's Miracles: Familiar Talks on Science
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“A multidisciplinary study group ... estimated that it would be 1980 before developments in artificial intelligence make it possible for machines alone to do much thinking or problem solving of military significance. That would leave, say, five years to develop man-computer symbiosis and 15 years to use it. The 15 may be 10 or 500, but those years should be intellectually the most creative and exciting in the history of mankind.”

ThinkingMenShouldYearsMayUseProblemWould BeScienceHistoryCreativeStudyFiveGroupsMankindMilitaryDevelopmentComputerIntellectualMachinesExcitingFive YearsSignificanceArtificial IntelligenceArtificialProblem SolvingSymbiosisStudy GroupMultidisciplinary
Book:In memoriam, J.C.R. Licklider, 1915-1990
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“There is romance, the genuine glinting stuff, in typewriters, and not merely in their development from clumsy giants into agile dwarfs, but in the history of their manufacture, which is filled with raids, battles, lonely pioneers, great gambles, hope, fear, despair, triumph. If some of our novels could be written by the typewriters instead of on them, how much better they would be.”

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Author:J. B. Priestley
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“The Whig interpretation of history ... is the tendency in many historians to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasise certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present.”

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Book:The Whig interpretation of history
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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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“Whether we like it or not, quantification in history is here to stay for reasons which the quantifiers themselves might not actively approve. We are becoming a numerate society: almost instinctively there seems now to be a greater degree of truth in evidence expressed numerically than in any literary evidence, no matter how shaky the statistical evidence, or acute the observing eye.”

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Author:J. H. Plumb
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