History Allusions Quotes & Sayings

Rizal is a compulsory course in school, but few teachers make Rizal's novels interesting. If students are taught to enjoy Rizal's works as literature instead of as a lodemine of 'patriotic' allusions I am sure they would not mind reading and rereading the 'Noli me Tangere'. — Ambeth R. Ocampo

You must never run from anything immortal. It attracts their attention. [ ... ] Never run. [ ... ] Walk slowly, and pretend to be thinking of something else. Sing a song, say a poem, do your tricks, but walk slowly and she may not follow. — Peter S. Beagle

Patriot writers attempted to inculcate civic virtue through allusions to classical history, frequently Greek but even more often Roman, and ancient glory. A revolutionary writer in the Virginia Gazette, wishing to "secure this valuable blessing [of classical virtue], and learn the greatness of its worth," wished to recommend to his "countrymen, especially the younger part of it, a thorough acquaintance with these records of illustrious liberty, the histories of Greece and Rome." The writer intended this recommendation not as a theoretical or academic exercise, but rather as a spur to urge Americans to "a glorious emulation of those virtues, which have immortalized their names." Classical examples would surely instill Americans with "a just hatred of tyranny and zeal for freedom," and induce them to follow "the godlike actions of those heroes and patriots, whose lives are delivered down to us by Plutarch. — Eran Shalev

adversity bends the heart as fire bends the stubborn steel, and those who are no longer their own governors, and the denizens of their own free independent state, must crouch before strangers. — Walter Scott

The New Deal exists principally on an emotional plane for Obama. To him, the New Deal is something you play like a song, to make you or your constituents feel better. — Amity Shlaes

Everybody loves music and it's fun - you feel like you're not working out. It makes the time go by quick and you're having fun and, especially if you take a class, there's the energy of other people and you're laughing. — Julianne Hough

For those who are willing to make an effort, great miracles and wonderful treasures are in store. — Isaac Bashevis Singer

You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions. — Richard Dawkins

For all the cynicism that the world contains, people are a little more open to those things that maybe are to do with returning you to some kind of simpler, happier state. — Kenneth Branagh

His heart hurt with the wanting of it, the hurt no less painful for being difficult to explain. — Maggie Stiefvater

I've done commercial work for Amtrak. However, that was branded as Stanton. I stipulated at the very beginning that it was not going to involve 'Humans of New York,' that I wasn't going to promote it on 'Humans of New York.' So nobody who follows me really even knows that I did it. — Brandon Stanton

It makes sense that your response to a bad break-up line would be to set someone on fire," I responded. "Fire is magical to us because it embodies the passage of time. We can never grasp time because it is invisible, unreachable and continually slipping from our grasp. Do we live in the present? How can we? The present is infinitesimally small. It can't contain human action. We teeter on the brink between our assumed future...where we will be in moments to come...and our memory of the past...where we think we just were. The present doesn't exist in a comprehensible way. Similarly, fire is something we can neither grasp nor touch, yet it has a clear effect...the decay and collapse of life, the acceleration of entropy. Thus when we stand mesmerized by fire, we are actually mesmerized by our own mortality. — David David Katzman

And as cynical and jaded as many have become, you see the heroic nature of cops, who put aside a lot of their own personal concerns and their families to speak for the dead, which is a sacred thing. Over time there is this thing in them that is very powerful and interesting and provocative to me. — Veena Sud

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ... — Ralph Nader

Most common people oft he market-place much prefer light literature to improving books. The problem is, that so many romances contain slanderous anecdotes about sovereigns and ministers or cast aspersions upon man's wives and daughters so that they are packed with sex and violence. Even worse are those writers of the breeze-and-moonlight school, who corrupt the young with pornography and filth. As for books of the beauty-and-talented-scholar type, a thousand are written to a single pattern and none escapes bordering on indecency. They are filled with allusions to handsome, talented young men and beautiful, refined girls in history; but in order to insert a couple of his own love poems, the author invents stereotyped heroes and heroines with the inevitable low character to make trouble between them like a clown in a play, and makes even the slave girls talk pedantic nonsense. So all these novels are full of contradictions and absurdly unnatural. — Cao Xueqin

One would naturally expect that the Lord Jesus Christ would be sufficiently important to receive ample notice in the literature of his time, and that extensive biographical material would be available. He was observed by multitudes of people, and his own followers numbered into the hundreds (1 Cor. 15:6), whose witness was still living in the middle of the first century. As a matter of fact, the amount of information concerning him is comparatively meager. Aside from the four Gospels, and a few scattered allusions in the epistles, contemporary history is almost silent concerning him. — Merrill C. Tenney