Famous Quotes & Sayings

Tana French

The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.

Samantha Shannon

I fell even more deeply in love with Tolkiens legendarium after studying Old English literature at uni, as I got a sense of the historical events and cultures that Tolkien used to create his world. My favourite of his imaginary locations is Lothlorien.

Rick Perlstein

No historical analogies are exactly precise.

Thomas Nagel

The more details we learn about the chemical basis of life and the intricacy of the genetic code, the more unbelievable the standard historical account becomes

Thomas Huxley

The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.

Robert Ballard

You don't let a historic site rot.

Robert Anton Wilson

[My wife] liked to collect old encyclopedias from second-hand bookstores, and at one point we had eight of them. When I wrote my first historical novel---back in 1980, before I was online---I used them often as a research tool. For instance, I learned that the Bastille was either 90 feet high or 100 feet or 120 feet. This led me to formulate Wilson's 22nd Law: 'Certitude belongs exclusively to those who only look in one encyclopedia.'

Thomas Carlyle

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

Tony Kushner

You don't go to the movies to do historical research, unless it's historical research about the movies.

Steven Biko

The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed.

Stefan Zweig

A word is nothing unless it has values and an atmosphere, unless you grasp its historical significance.

Thomas B. Macaulay

The history of nations, in the sense in which I use the word, is often best studied in works not professedly historical.

Thomas B. Macaulay

History distinguishes what is accidental and transitory in human nature from what is essential and immutable.

Thomas Jefferson

Bank-paper must be suppressed, and the circulating medium must be restored to the nation to whom it belongs.

Thomas Friedman

The historical debate is over. The answer is free-market capitalism.

Raymond Queneau

All societies are historical.

Raymond Queneau

The Odyssey is the story of Americans up to the point where they are well-established, and even so it is detached from the historical side.

Sarah Sutton

I like the stories with the historical themes.

Sandra Cisneros

I've always read broadly: literary fiction, sci-fi, fantasy, chick lit, historical, dystopian, nonfiction, memoir. I've even read Westerns. I prefer female protagonists.

Samuel Johnson

Many falsehoods are passing into uncontradicted history.

Samuel Johnson

Ye who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope; who expect that age will perform the promises of youth, and that the deficiencies of the present day will be supplied by the morrow, - attend to the history of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia.

Samuel Johnson

Great abilities are not requisite for an Historian; for in historical composition, all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent.

Ronald Reagan

In this new world economy, national boundaries are increasingly becoming obsolete.

Reza Aslan

The New Testament is not a historical document.

Vladimir Lenin

Democracy is indispensable to socialism.

Walter Benjamin

Things are only mannequins and even the great world-historical events are only costumes beneath which they exchange glances with nothingness

Rudolf Otto

That Krishna himself was a historical figure is indeed quite indubitable.

Wilfred Owen

If I have to be a soldier I must be a good one, anything else is unthinkable

Walter Kaufmann

Paul substituted faith in Christ for the Christlike life.

Voltaire

History is but the record of crimes and misfortunes. L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs

Voltaire

All the ancient histories, as one of our wits say, are just fables that have been agreed upon

William Ernest Hocking

However rich we may become in knowledge of the deeper causes of historical results, we forgo all understanding of history if we forget this inner continuity,--i.e., the conscious intentions of the participants in history-making and their consciously known successes.

Walter Scott

There is a vulgar incredulity, which in historical matters, as well as in those of religion, finds it easier to doubt than to examine.