Famous Quotes & Sayings

David Mitchell

All revolutions are the sheerest fantasy until they happen; then they become historical inevitabilities.

David Korten

An active propaganda machinery controlled bv the world's largest corporations constantly reassures us that consumerism is the path to happiness, governmental restraint of market excess is the cause our distress, and economic globalization is both a historical inevitability and a boon to the human species.

Dave Barry

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

Camille Paglia

There is a constant rush to judgment in Foucault. He is filled with specious generalizations, false categories, distortions, fudging, pretenses to knowledge in areas where he was ignorant. He had no ability whatsoever to distinguish among historical sources, where he makes terrible blunders.

C. L. R. James

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

Ai Weiwei

No matter what happens, nothing can prevent the historical process by which society demands freedom and democracy,

Arnold J. Toynbee

History not used is nothing, for all intellectual life is action, like practical life, and if you don't use the stuff - well, it might as well be dead.

Antony Beevor

The blurring of fact and fiction has great commercial potential, which is bound to be corrupting in historical terms.

Cassie Steele

I like mythology - anything historical.

Cass Sunstein

Probably, if we looked at Da Vinci or Michelangelo with care, we'd see a historical particularity that the work is not treated as having. It's certainly true of Shakespeare.

Carl Clinton Van Doren

Familiar life, tending to sordidness, had been succeeded by remote life, generally idealized; historical detail had been brought in to teach readers who were being entertained.

Bill Watterson

My likely historical significance is a terrible burden. ~ Calvin

Benjamin Franklin

A Republic, if you can keep it.

Tom Hulce

Teachers don't tell us the truth about historical people. If we knew the truth, parents couldn't hold their lives up as examples.

Brian Eno

I've got nothing against records - I've spent my life making them - but they are a kind of historical blip.

Octavio Paz

The truth is that the history of Mexico is a history in the image of its geography: abrupt and tortuous. Each historical period is like a plateau surrounded by tall mountains and separated from the other plateaus by precipices and divides.

Dennis Farina

I love England and the historical aspect of it.

We're playing Mozart's 35th symphony because of the historical significance. It was the first piece the orchestra played when it started in 1982.

Marissa Moss

When I'm working on historical books, I'm much more organized. I usually read about 100 books to get the depth of knowledge I need.

Thomas Mallon

I often tell people who want to write historical fiction: don't read all that much about the period you're writing about; read things from the period that you're writing about. There's a tendency to stoke up on a lot of biography and a lot of history, and not to actually get back to the original sources.

Nicolas Berggruen

I was living in Paris, which is a very beautiful, very wonderful place, but a tight place as a city, a tight place culturally. Its people are very brilliant, thoughtful, the place functions, but it's a historical place in some ways, like a big museum.

William Gibson

I don't think nostalgia is a healthy modality. But nostalgia and a sense of history are not the same thing. Nostalgia is a dysfunction of the historical impulse, or a corruption of the historical impulse.

Lauren Willig

I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.

Nancy Horan

If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.

We're at the stage of the market where it seems to be detaching from historical fundamentals.

We are optimistic that our people will go to vote in this historical event.

I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.

Kara Walker

I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.

Bruno Heller

I essentially took the seed of that idea to try to tell a big, historical epic, but from the street level, the everyman's point of view.

Alison Weir

I feel very strongly that where the facts exist, a historical novelist should use them if they're writing about a person who really lived, because a lot of people come to history through historical novels. I did. And a lot of people want their history that way.

Ed Harris

I don't have the luxury of the firsthand historical knowledge that you have. You'll probably find the same thing with the board.

Carroll Quigley

I came into history from a primary concern with mathematics and science. This has been a tremendous help to me as a person and as a historian, although it must be admitted it has served to make my historical interpretations less conventional than may be acceptable of many of my colleagues in the field.

Alan Furst

I invented the historical spy novel.