#history

The young man looked down from the cart at the people in front of him. Jonah felt his teacher’s eyes meet his own, and for a fraction of a second a smile played on the prisoner’s lips. Then he glanced toward heaven and spoke. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. ↗

— Anna Myers

#heroes #history #nathan-hale #patriotism #revolutionary-war

Man makes history; woman is history. The reproduction of the species is feminine: it runs steadily and quietly through all species, animal or human, through all short-lived cultures. It is primary, unchanging, everlasting, maternal, plantlike, and cultureless. If we look back we find that it is synonymous with life itself. ↗

— Oswald Spengler

#iron-logic #nature #truth #life

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether. ↗

— Jim Butcher

#history #ignorance #ignorance

The world is round. ↗

— Christopher Columbus

#science

He wrested the world's whereabouts from the stars, and locked the secret in a pocket watch. ↗

— Dava Sobel

#invention #inventors #science #science

Bruno withdrew from the field of history more resolutely than Vigo; that is why I prefer the former’s retrospect but the latter’s prospect. As an anarch, I am determined to go along with nothing, ultimately take nothing seriously – at least not nihilistically, but rather as a border guard in no man’s land, who sharpens his eyes and ears between the tides. ↗

— Ernst Jünger

#anarchy #ernst-jünger #history #nihilism #time

Half of writing history is hiding the truth. ↗

— Joss Whedon

#foucault #history #lies #truth #lie

Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. ↗

— Sarah Vowell

#coffee #history #coffee

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done. ↗

— Arthur Conan Doyle

#belief #rewriting-history #sherlock-holmes #belief

Constantine saw with his own eyes the trophy of a cross of light in the heavens, above the sun, and bearing this inscription: conquer by this. At the sight, he himself was struck with amazement and his whole army also. ↗

— Eusebius

#church-history #constantine #orthodoxy #patristics #saints