Historical quotes
1.1K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"Grape juice at the communion table symbolizes the historical impotence of Christ’s blood, Christ’s gospel, Christ’s church, and Christ’s expanding kingdom. Grape juice stays ‘bottled up’, confined to the historical skins of Palestine."
"I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans."
"The world I grew up in had both a literal and mythological quality. We were on the borders of several worlds - the larger black world bordered us on one side. More distantly, there was the larger white world. We interacted with some, but not others. If you think of it as an internal geography, it is a land, a contested space with these very charged historical, cultural, and emotional borders."
"Historical fiction is not history. You're blending real events and actual historical personages with characters of your own creation."
"I have always regarded historical fiction and fantasy as sisters under the skin, two genres separated at birth."
"As much as I love historical fiction, my problem with historical fiction is that you always know what's going to happen."
"Happiness is more effectually dispensed to mankind under a republican form of government than any other."
"Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense."
"[T]he people as ultimate sovereigns, retain the ultimate power - and even the duty - to overthrow any government that fails to respect their authority."
"I'm sorry to say it has some historical analogs. It's kind of reminiscent of what happened in Germany in the late Weimar years."
"It's not a matter of public relations and rhetorical style but of actions. It's the actions and policies under George W.Bush administration that have left the US government remarkably isolated, feared and often hated to an extent with no historical precedent."
"What can realistically be done depends on the historical moment. The same is true with regard to the agents."
"The reaction we should be having to [rich liberals] is not ridicule, but rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany."
"In general, I think my freedom of invention is not limited when I use historical characters."
"Nothing is easier than to teach historical method, but, when learned, it has little use."
"There is no extrahistorical or eternalist or abstractivistically pure standpoint where we can get oriented in the absolute Truth per se before dealing with the concrete lineaments of how we happen exist in this time and place. We are participants in a dynamic system and we know its profile only by its action in organizing how we interact together and how we see our own selves. "The truth is the whole," and the whole is a system of living energy: our life as human and historical spirits."
"Without doubt, President [Barack] Obama is a great historical figure."
"If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from the physical life-process."
"By the same right under which France took Flanders, Lorraine and Alsace, and will sooner or later take Belgium — by that same right Germany takes over Schleswig; it is the right of civilisation as against barbarism, of progress as against stability."
"The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us."
