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#history

Read through the most famous quotes by topic #history




Things just happen, one after another. They don't care who knows. But history... ah, history is different. History has to be observed. Otherwise it's not history. It's just... well, things happening one after another.


Terry Pratchett


#history #humor #humor

[On School Uniforms] Don't these schools do enough damage making all these kids think alike, now they have to make them look alike too? It's not a new idea, either. I first saw it in old newsreels from the 1930s, but it was hard to understand because the narration was in German.


George Carlin


#history #humor #satire #school #uniform

And when Franz Ferdinand pays, everybody pays!


Thomas Pynchon


#humor #prophetic #humor

History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.


Esther M. Friesner


#humor #reality-tv #writing #humor

Next time!" In what calendar are kept the records of those next times which never come?


Helen Hunt Jackson


#calendar #california #female-author #future #helen-hunt-jackson

Some in Westminster have talked about her receiving a state funeral when she dies, which seems a bizarre sort of tribute to someone who believed the state should do as little as possible. It would be far more appropriate to allow competitive bids from private companies to run the funeral arrangements. 'And we now go over live to Westminster, where state leaders are lining up for Lady Thatcher's funeral sponsored by McDonald's. And there we see the coffin respectfully borne on the shoulders of six part-time burger-flippers dressed in the official Ronald McDonald costume, before the private cremation when the body will be flame-grilled with gherkins and a slice of cheese.' It's what she would have wanted.


John O'Farrell


#history #margaret-thatcher #respect

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins.


Robert A. Heinlein


#heinlein #history #starship-troopers #war #communism

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative.


Thomas Keneally


#holocaust #injustice #injustice

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.


Jennifer Egan


#history #music #sociology #music

Chicago is not the most corrupt of cities. The state of New Jersey has a couple. Need we mention Nevada? Chicago, though, is the Big Daddy. Not more corrupt, just more theatrical, more colorful in its shadiness.


Studs Terkel


#sociology #sociology






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