#history

History is malleable. A new cache of diaries can shed new light, and archeological evidence can challenge our popular assumptions. ↗

— Ken Burns

#assumptions #challenge #diaries #evidence #history

I cannot lead you into battle. I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else - I can give my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations. ↗

— Elizabeth II

#administer #battle #brotherhood #cannot #devotion

Never in our country's history have we witnessed a natural disaster that has impacted so many people in such a wide area. In fact, as of the writing of this column, millions of people along the Gulf Coast have been displaced from their homes in a period of only five days. ↗

— Jo Bonner

#area #been #coast #column #country

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better. ↗

— Edward de Bono

#better #continue #doing #freeze #frozen

I approach writing female characters the same why I approach writing male characters. I never think I'm writing about women, I think I'm writing about one woman, one person. And I try to imagine what she is like, and endow her with a lot of my own thoughts and history. ↗

— Jeffrey Eugenides

#approach #characters #endow #female #female characters

All people, even secular people, are seeing books on the market like The End of History. ↗

— Tim LaHaye

#end #even #history #like #market

Throughout America's young history there has been a necessary tension between the individual and the group. ↗

— Harold Evans

#been #between #group #history #individual

To take wine into our mouths is to savor a droplet of the river of human history. ↗

— Clifton Paul Fadiman

#human #human history #into #mouths #our

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal. ↗

— David Brin

#been #both #both sides #contact #encounter