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Read through the most famous quotes by topic #history
You see, I have been at revaluing myself in the last few days. I may have some value to historians because I have destroyed a few things. The builder of your Cathedral is forgotten even now, but I, who burned it, may be remembered for a hundred years or so. And that may mean something or other about mankind. ↗
By imputing to human love features properly reserved for divine love, such as the unconditional and the eternal, we falsify the nature of this most conditional and time-bound and earthy emotion, and force it to labour under intolerable expectations. This divinisation of human love is the latest chapter in humanity’s impulsive quest to steal the powers of its gods, and the longest-running such attempt to reach beyond our humanity. Like the others it must fail; for the moral of these stories is that the limits of the human can be ignored only at terrible cost. ↗
For four centuries now, the American people have resigned themselves to natural disasters and acts of God: floods, prairie fires, blizzards, tornados, hurricanes, dust bowls, epidemics, academics, lawyers, and politicians. ↗
I was on one of my world 'walkabouts.' It had taken me once more through Hong Kong, to Japan, Australia, and then Papua New Guinea in the South Pacific [one of the places I grew up]. There I found the picture of 'the Father.' It was a real, gigantic Saltwater Crocodile (whose picture is now featured on page 1 of TEETH). From that moment, 'the Father' began to swim through the murky recesses of my mind. Imagine! I thought, men confronting the world’s largest reptile on its own turf! And what if they were stripped of their firearms, so they must face this force of nature with nothing but hand weapons and wits? We know that neither whales nor sharks hunt individual humans for weeks on end. But, Dear Reader, crocodiles do! They are intelligent predators that choose their victims and plot their attacks. So, lost on its river, how would our heroes escape a great hunter of the Father’s magnitude? And what if these modern men must also confront the headhunters and cannibals who truly roam New Guinea? What of tribal wars, the coming of Christianity and materialism (the phenomenon known as the 'Cargo Cult'), and the people’s introduction to 'civilization' in the form of world war? What of first contact between pristine tribal culture and the outside world? What about tribal clashes on a global scale—the hatred and enmity between America and Japan, from Pearl Harbor, to the only use in history of atomic weapons? And if the world could find peace at last, how about Johnny and Katsu? ↗
#adventure #american-history #australia #biggest-crocodile #cannibal
Nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history - our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events. What once occupied all our minds and filled the musty meeting halls with the awareness of heroism and destiny has now become chiefly a matter for the historical scholar. ↗
Taj Mahal adalah bangunan yang menjadi bagian dari salah satu tujuh keajaiban dunia. Dibangun oleh Shah Jahan sebagai pusara bagi istrinya Mumtaz Mahal yang meninggal karena melahirkan sungsang ketika peperangan sedang berlangsung. Bagi Shah Jahan Taj Mahal adalah gambaran kecantikan dan keanggunan isterinya yang akan selalu dikenang oleh dirinya dan rakyatnya. Shah Jahan mengutus arsitek berdarah Persia untuk membangun Taj Mahal, Isa namanya. Yang akhirnya jatuh cinta pada Jahanara, puteri Shah Jahan yang bersuamikan Khondamir. Isa sangat mengagumi kecantikan Jahanara yang sangat mirip dengan ibunya, Mumtaz Mahal. Jahanara pun selingkuh dengan Isa yang juga sangat ia cintai, karena sejatinya Jahanara tidak pernah mencintai khondamir. Mereka menikah hanya karena alasan politik. Dibalik bangunan indah dan berdiri megah itu terdapat kisah yang haru, kejam, indah sekaligus membawa pembaca pada zaman kerajaan Hindustan. ↗
It is undoubtedly true that religion is often socially conservative. By binding a people together under a shared God, a common cosmology and a common morality, religion creates order and stability and its rituals create social cohesio...n. By promising to the pious poor rewards in the next life, it reconciles them to their fate in this one and thus discourages them from rebelling against their condition... [also] religion [is] an inspiration to radicalism and rebellion. religion is a potential threat to any political or social order because it claims an authority higher than any available in this world. pp. 10-11 ↗
To be the child of a conficted or reputed witch was inherently dangerous; in one pathetic case in Lorraine a young couple were both accused, and it emerged that they had decided to marry after attending an execution at the stake of their respective parents, 'so that they would have nothing to reproach one another with. ↗
When, however, one reads of a witch being ducked, of a woman possessed by devils, of a wise woman selling herbs, or even of a very remarkable man who had a mother, then I think we are on the track of a lost novelist, a suppressed poet, of some mute and inglorious Jane Austen, some Emily Bronte who dashed her brains out on the moor or mopped and mowed about the highways crazed with the torture that her gift had put her to. Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman. ↗
