History Quotes

“Mythology does not interest me. Nor does history. But the possible overlap between history and mythology excites me immensely.”

“As the most radical agenda in American history comes through the 117th Congress, the Whip Team will play an important role in making sure House Republicans keep a united front in advocating for conservative policies and principles.”

“Maybe I am the driver who got the most close to the championship in history.”

“The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That’s what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories.”

“Global Warming: It is a hoax. It is bad science. It is high-jacking public policy. It is the greatest scam in history.”

“I'm not in the most comfortable position, but I think my government is very stable, perhaps more stable than any government in modern Israeli history.”

“Multiculturalism may well be our saviour, wresting us out from the straitjacket of our history, thrusting the old continent into an environment where other ethnicities, less cynical and more positive, will play a big role in its future.”

“Even through all the imperfections, mistakes and disagreements of our past, our aspiration to be good and do good has been the enduring quality that made us the most exceptional nation in the history of the world.”

“I don't think that there's been one example in history where somebody has openly talked about their personal life and it's done them any good.”

“I prefer my history dead. Dead history is writ in ink, the living sort in blood.""Do you want to die old and craven in your bed?""How else? Though not till I'm done reading.”

“Throughout history we humans have struggled to find meaning in the awesome contradiction of our human condition. Neither philosophy, nor psychology nor biology has, until now, been able to provide the truthful explanation.”

“Often interfaces are assumed to be synonymous with media itself. But what would it mean to say that “interface” and “media” are two names for the same thing? The answer is found in the remediation or layer model of media, broached already in the introduction, wherein media are essentially nothing but formal containers housing other pieces of media. This is a claim most clearly elaborated on the opening pages of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media. McLuhan liked to articulate this claim in terms of media history: a new medium is invented, and as such its role is as a container for a previous media format. So, film is invented at the tail end of the nineteenth century as a container for photography, music, and various theatrical formats like vaudeville. What is video but a container for film. What is the Web but a container for text, image, video clips, and so on. Like the layers of an onion, one format encircles another, and it is media all the way down. This definition is well-established today, and it is a very short leap from there to the idea of interface, for the interface becomes the point of transition between different mediatic layers within any nested system. The interface is an “agitation” or generative friction between different formats. In computer science, this happens very literally; an “interface” is the name given to the way in which one glob of code can interact with another. Since any given format finds its identity merely in the fact that it is a container for another format, the concept of interface and medium quickly collapse into one and the same thing.”

“The great thing about America is that people take its history and mythologise it.”

“Other tourists may remember London for its spectacular sights and history, but I remember it for Islam.”

“There are two kinds of books in the world--the boring kind they make you read in school and the interesting kind that they won't let you read in school because then they would have to talk about real stuff like sex and divorce and is there a God and if there isn't then what happens when you die, and how come the history books have so many lies in them.”

“The ultimate irony in this vast struggle (available to audience members who want to think about it but easily ignored by those who accept the semi-happy ending ) is the irony in many time loop (or ontological paradox) stories: John Connor has created himself (though he has not gone as far as the character in Robert Heinlein’s “All You Zombies” who is both his own father and mother). Far worse, by saving his mother’s life and ensuring the destruction of the Terminator, John Connor has created Skynet just as surely as Skynet has created John Connor by trying to kill him. Both Connor and Skynet exist in a time loop without outside causality. The Terminator’s surviving arm makes Skynet possible, but it is never invented, only found and back-engineered. Kyle Reese comes across time for Sarah Connor because of a picture and because John Connor asks him to, but neither the picture nor John Connor would exist if Reese had not already gone back in time. The simplest way to save the world is to let the Terminator kill Sarah Connor. Then (in all probability), no one would find a piece of the advanced technology, and Skynet could not be built. But, Cameron’s plot suggests, the “perils to come that would result from our hubris and blind faith in technology” may be inescapable, a time loop, a feedback loop, leading directly if not necessarily inevitably to destruction."Fighting the History Wars on the Big Screen: From the Terminator to Avatar" from The Films of James Cameron”

“Getting involved with 'Black 47' was like getting involved with 'Dunkirk' for me. I learned a lot. But 'Black 47' was my own history from my own country.”

“I got interested in the Vikings, and then you realize that there isn't much to be read about them because they did not write their history. It was written by hostile witnesses, by Christian monks and so on. From what I could see and understand, I was really excited about it. I loved their culture and loved their gods.”

“If you have a great product but no one knows about it, it's history.”

“We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.”