History Day Quotes & Sayings

I am so profoundly grateful for the gospel of Jesus Christ, for a testimony of the Atonement of the Savior. I believe in it with all my heart, and I live for it, and I bear witness of it this day. Of all of the events of human history, none other approaches the Atonement of the Savior in its meaning and in its results. God be thanked for the gift of His precious Son, to whom we all owe thanks for His sacrifice in our behalf. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Amid increasing chaos, here lay the potential dominants. Much action and the play of forces even on a huge scale and with enormous material effects is often irrelevant, and counts for little or nothing in the final result: but along the chain of commanding causation even the smallest events are vital. It is these which should be studied and pondered over; for in them is revealed the profound significance of human choice and the sublime responsibility of men. No one can tell that he may not some day set a stone rolling or take or neglect some ordinary step which in its consequences will alter the history of the world. — Winston S. Churchill

History is the business of identifying momentous events from the comfort of a high-back chair. With the benefit of time, the historian looks back and points to a date in the manner of a gray-haired field marshal pointing to a bend in a river on a map: There it was, he says. The turning point. The decisive factor. The fateful day that fundamentally altered all that was to follow. There — Amor Towles

When I train, I love to take time off and fly to the Natural History Museum or an exhibition. I just love that. When you know your past, it will help you with your future ... That's why most of my friends are not fighters. Most of my friends are nerds like me. That's why I have a hard time finding a girlfriend. I need someone to talk science with. I'm married to my work right now. But you never know. One day I could wake up and just do something different. Life is so unpredictable. — Georges St-Pierre

Throughout history, the technology always comes first. It's just technology for a while, until the day we artists inherit it. — Lee Clow

Several died the day the bomb was dropped. Some lived six months after the explosion but died anyway. They were all lost. It was so long ago, young man. To you it is a history story. To me it is my life. — Joseph G. Peterson

I choose to believe that the same God who intervened to bring his Son back to life intervened on this day in history to help his people. — Steven Furtick

Witchcraft was hung, in History,
But History and I
Find all the Witchcraft that we need
Around us, every Day - — Emily Dickinson

Stories are there to be told, and each story changes with the telling. Time changes them. Logic changes them. Grammar changes them. History changes them. Each story is shifted side-ways by each day that unfolds. Nothing ends. The only thing that matters, as Faulkner once put it, is the human heart in conflict with itself. At the heart of all this is the possibility, or desire, to create a piece of art that talks to the human instinct for recovery and joy. — Colum McCann

Nothing you do in the White House matters. You know why not? Because as far as the mass of voting morons is concerned, while you're in office, you'll still be the worst single president they've ever had until you stop. Then it's some other poor bastard's turn. And even that doesn't matter, because ten, twenty years later, they'll look back on you, and wonder why they didn't appreciate you when they had you ... You don't get to make a difference. You don't get to do jack shit. You know what you get? ... You get an entry in the history book, and every 15 minutes, every day at Disneyworld, an animatronic puppet wearing your face will wave or nod when the spotlight hits it. — Neil Gaiman

We just held each other for warmth. I cannot recall that we even spoke to one another. Such was our shock. That day we learnt a new word - war. — P.J. Whittlesea

History, human or geological, represents our hypothesis, couched in terms of past events, devised to explain our present-day observations. — M. King Hubbert

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face. — Julian Barnes

If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds. — Jenny Offill

When Turkey began approaching the EU, I wasn't the only one who worried that the dark stain in Turkey's history - or rather the history of the Ottoman Empire - could become a problem one day. In other words, what happened to the Armenians in World War I. That's why I couldn't leave the issue untouched. — Orhan Pamuk

It would mean a lot to me to get into the Hall of Fame, to be grouped with some of the greatest players in history. — Leon Day

One day," said Hermione, sounding thoroughly exasperated, "you'll read Hogwarts: A History, and perhaps that will remind you that you can't Apparate or Disapparate inside Hogwarts. — J.K. Rowling

If you need to know history, the real story of those before you, then you should go to the library and read newspaper clippings of someone like Muhammad Ali every day, then it might giver you some understanding of the man. — Alex Haley

History doesn't choose individual people. History chooses everyone. Every day. The only question is: How long will you ignore the call? — Brad Meltzer

What had transpired that day in 1903, in the stiff winds and cold of the Outer Banks in less than two hours time, was one of the turning points in history, the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined. With their homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without a doubt that man could fly and if the world did not yet know it, they did. Their flights that morning were the first ever in which a piloted machine took off under its own power into the air in full flight, sailed forward with no loss of speed, and landed at a point as high as that from which it started. — David McCullough

One of the core ideas of the Bible is that meaning can be found in history. The sheer act of telling and retelling stories helps us to understand God's role in the world as well as our own position in a long line of ancestors who have wrestled with similar issues to the ones we wrestle with every day. — Bruce Feiler

To die for a cause is easy, to live, to be steady day after day doing the small things, taking care of the details, knowing you will be forgotten by history and still choosing to do so, that is real courage — Anonymous

In a very real sense, the Constitution is our compact with history ... [but] the Constitution can maintain that compact and serve as the lodestar of our political system only if its terms are binding on us. To the extent we depart from the document's language and rely instead on generalities that we see written between the lines, we rob the Constitution of its binding force and give free reign to the fashions and passions of the day. — Alex Kozinski

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary. — George Orwell

The desert is an unpredictable place. One day you're sweating, the next you're freezing. One moment the air is damp and cloudy like when the tide is coming in, the next the entire world is orange and dusty. The desert must be a woman. — Dianna Skowera

The two great moments in human history are the day that Christ was born and the day He was raised from the dead. These are represented by Christmas and Easter - the two biggest holidays for the church. People who don't even go to church do go on these days. — Louie Giglio

[This is] the only period in all human history when people were proud of being modern. For though to-day is always to-day and the moment is always modern, we are the only men in all history who fell back upon bragging about the mere fact that to-day is not yesterday. I fear that some in the future will explain it by saying that we had precious little else to brag about. For, whatever the medieval faults, they went with one merit. Medieval people never worried about being medieval; and modern people do worry horribly about being modern. — G.K. Chesterton

History is a hermaphrodite with many distinguished lovers. We are neither mysteries nor strangers but the living breath of revelation made flesh by the unrestrained desires of a free and universal love. Universal me. Universal you.
from Past Present and Future are One — Aberjhani

On February 8, 1928, known as Lindbergh day since it was the day he crossed the Atlantic Ocean the year before, Charles A. Lindbergh landed at the Campo Columbia airfield near Havana. Lindbergh had visited many countries in his plane, and he had the national flags of each country painted in the fuselage. Having flown from Haiti, on a Goodwill Tour of the Caribbean in his "Spirit of St. Louis," he had the Cuban flag painted on his a single-engine Ryan monoplane. It was the last country he visited before he donated the "Spirit of St. Louis" to the Smithsonian Institution, where it is still exhibited at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. — Hank Bracker

I've always felt that distant train whistles heard in the dead of night are the universe's way of letting us know the best days are neither ahead nor behind us ... they're happening right now, cradled in the palms of our hands. But that doesn't change the fact that the whiskey, weed, and romance eventually runs out and the night will soon turn to day. — Dave Matthes

If there was ever a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about. — Meg Rosoff

Puritans called marriage "the little church within the Church," a place to test and also develop spiritual character. Every day marriage calls both partners to love and forgive and stay faithful - hard work that only makes sense if we are convinced somehow that we are participating in a kind of alternate history, one set in eternity. I persevere in the difficult times in my marriage for the same reason I persevere in the difficult times in my faith: because I believe that both touch something of eternal significance. — Philip Yancey

One day in the woods he met an Indian. They stood in the wet, cold woods and looked at each other, and they could not talk because they did not know each other's words — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I believe history will come to view 9/11 as an event on par with November 22, 1963, the date on which John F. Kennedy was murdered, cutting short a presidency that was growing ever more promising. Dreams died that day in Dallas; it is easy to imagine the 1960s turning out rather differently had President Kennedy lived. — Jon Meacham

The biggest day in the history of Kentucky's program. — John Calipari

I have referred to this unpleasant part of the history of the South simply for the purpose of calling attention to the great change that has taken place since the days of the "Ku Klux." To-day there are no such organizations in the South, and the fact that such ever existed is almost forgotten by both races. There are few places in the South now where public sentiment would permit such organizations to exist. Chapter — Booker T. Washington

However, once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end and a completely new kind of process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend. Many scholars try to predict how the world will look in the year 2100 or 2200. This is a waste of time. Any worthwhile prediction must take into account the ability to re-engineer human minds, and this is impossible. There are many wise answers to the question, 'What would people with minds like ours do with biotechnology?' Yet there are no good answers to the question, 'What would beings with a different kind of mind do with biotechnology?' All we can say is that people similar to us are likely to use biotechnology to re-engineer their own minds, and our present-day minds cannot grasp what might happen next. — Yuval Noah Harari

Oh yes", said the old woman, "but I've heard these so-called stoves are by no means all they are supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year.. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts."
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever setting eyes on a stove, had suffered almost no ailments in the past sixty-five years. — Halldor Laxness

I'm resigned to the fact that the corseted history of America is not as exciting as that of Britain. — Felicia Day

It is pretended that, as in the Preamble to the Constitution, it is "we the people" who wrote that document, rather than fifty-five privileged white males whose class interest required a strong central government. That use of government for class purposes, to serve the needs of the wealthy and powerful, has continued throughout American history, down to the present day. It is disguised by language that suggests all of us - rich and poor and middle class - have a common interest. — Howard Zinn

When history as the world knows it no longer exists, and there are no longer any great kings or great wars or great political machinations; when there are no histories of countries left to cherish, no more dollars; when it's no longer the strong versus the weak, and all that's left is the story of the great God and King, and all has been righted, and the heroes are now the missionaries and the ministers of grace - of which every believer can be - and our eyes behold Him as He truly is ... words fail. That is where our heart ought to be. But we are not there. And yet, we are. Let us wait for that day, expectantly and eagerly. Let us fix our eyes on heaven, where our citizenship is held securely, where we are presently united to Christ in spirit. Only let us hold true to what we have already attained. And we will yet attain it. — Matt Chandler

Humankind has understood history as a series of battles because, to this day, it regards conflict as the central facet of life. — Anton Chekhov

If we look at our history with honesty and clarity we will be forced to admit that our federal form of government has been, from the day of its birth, weakened in integrity, confused and confounded in its direction, by the unresolved race question. It is as if a political thalidomide drug taken during pregnancy caused the birth of a crippled nation. — Martin Luther King Jr.

History lessons remind us that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict, often of the most bloodthirsty sort. Our daily diet of news brings us reports of the shedding of blood, often in regions quite close to our homelands, in circumstances that deny our conception of cultural normality altogether. We succeed, all the same, in consigning the lessons both of history and of reportage to a special and separate category of "otherness" which invalidate our expectations of how our own world will be tomorrow and the day after not at all. Our institutions and our laws, we tell ourselves, have set the human potentiality for violence about with such restraints that violence in everyday life will be punished as criminal by our laws, while its use by our institutions of state will take the particular form of "civilised warfare. — Steven Pinker

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul. — Russell Baker

In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness; we are each the uncompanioned hermit and recluse of an hour or a day; we understand our fellows of the cell to whatever age of history they may belong. — Sarah Orne Jewett

You don't understand that one can be an atheist, one can not know whether God exists or why, and at the same time know that man does not live in nature but in history, and that in present-day understanding it was founded by Christ, that its foundation is the Gospel. And what is history? It is the setting in motion of centuries of work at the gradual unriddling of death and its eventual overcoming. Hence the discovery of mathematical infinity and electromagnetic waves, hence the writing of symphonies. It is impossible to move on in that direction without a certain uplift. These discoveries call for spiritual equipment. The grounds for it are contained in the Gospel. They are these. First, love of one's neighbor, that highest form of living energy, overflowing man's heart and demanding to be let out and spent, and then the main component parts of modern man, without which he is unthinkable
namely, the idea of the free person and the idea of life as sacrifice. — Boris Pasternak

Edmond just lay there smoking and telling me he loved me without saying anything out loud and if there ever was a more perfect day in the history of time it isn't one I've heard about. The — Meg Rosoff

I have a dream, and a plan, to combine the commercial possibilities of Valentine's Day with the substance and meaning of black history month. I call it: Blackentine's Day. — Mo Rocca

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo. — Margaret Lazarus Dean

It's a dangerous game Cherrycoke's playing here. Often he thinks the sheer volume of information pouring in through his fingers will saturate, burn him out...she seems determined to overwhelm him with her history and its pain, and the edge of it, always fresh from the stone, cutting at his hopes, at all their hopes. He does respect her: he knows that very little of this is female theatricals, really. She has turned her face, more than once, to the Outer Radiance and simply seen nothing there. And so each time has taken a little more of the Zero into herself. It comes down to courage, at worst an amount of self-deluding that's vanishingly small: he has to admire it, even if he can't accept her glassy wastes, her appeals to a day not of wrath but of final indifference... — Thomas Pynchon

Our history is that we can very aggressively, if necessary, and openly and democratically discuss our differences. We have a democratic history in which we come together and vote on these things. — Stockwell Day

The concept of individual rights is so new in human history that most men have not grasped it fully to this day. In accordance with the two theories of ethics, the mystical or the social, some men assert that rights are a gift of God
others, that rights are a gift of society. But, in fact, the source of rights is man's nature. — Ayn Rand

It's as though not even that most basic level of imaginative thought had been admitted into consciousness to cause the slightest disturbance. A century of destruction unlike any other in its extremity befalls and blights the human race - scores of millions of ordinary people condemned to suffer deprivation upon deprivation, atrocity upon atrocity, evil upon evil, half the world or more subjected to pathological sadism as social policy, whole societies organized and fettered by the fear of violent persecution, the degradation of individual life engineered on a scale unknown throughout human history, nations broken and enslaved by ideological criminals who rob them of everything, entire populations so demoralized as to be unable to get out of bed in the morning with the minutest desire to face the day ... all the terrible touchstones presented by this century, and here they are up in arms about Faunia Farley. — Philip Roth

Most Americans think of Rosa Parks as a demur, pleasant-enough seamstress who backed into history by being too tired to get out of her seat on a bus one day, in reality she had been trained in nonviolence spirit and tactics at a famous institution, Highlander Folk School. It seems to be a difficult concept for most of us that peace is a skill that can be learned. We know war can be learned, but we seem to think that one becomes a peacemaker by a mere change of heart. (23) — Mahatma Gandhi

That there should be so wide a difference between us Americans and these English, from whom we were divided, so to say, but the other day, is one of the most peculiar physiological phenomena that the history of the world will have afforded. As — Anthony Trollope

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week. — Douglas Coupland

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures. Nowadays, time moves forward at a rapid pace. Forgotten overnight, a historic event glistens the next day like the morning dew and thus is no longer the backdrop to a narrator's tale but rather an amazing adventure enacted against the background of the over-familiar banality of private life. — Milan Kundera

Politics are receiving a lot of attention because we have nothing else to interest us. No nation in the history of the world was ever sitting as pretty. If we want anything, all we have to do is go and buy it on credit. So that leaves us without any economic problem whatever, except perhaps some day to have to pay for them. But we are certainly not thinking about that this early. — Will Rogers

The thing that most haunted me that day, however ... was the fact that these things had - apparently - actually occurred ... For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth - really seen it - you can't look away. — Elizabeth Kostova

Now he laughs for real, cackling with the wicked innocence of the bright and easily bored. Staff Sergeant David Dime is a twenty-four-year-old college dropout from North Carolina who subscribes to the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Maxim, Wired, Harper's, Fortune, and DicE Magazine, all of which he reads in addition to three or four books a week, mostly used textbooks on history and politics that his insanely hot sister sends from Chapel Hill. There are stories that he went to college on a golf scholarship, which he denies. That he was a star quarterback in high school, which he claims not to remember, though one day a football surfaced at FOB Viper, and Dime, caught up in the moment, perhaps, nostalgia triggering some long-dormant muscle memory, uncorked a sixty-yard spiral that sailed over Day's head into the base motor pool. — Ben Fountain

Sometimes, I have a dared dream to myself that one day, history may even say that my voice--which disturbed the white man's smugness, and his arrogance, and his complacency--that my voice helped to save America from a grave, possibly even a fatal catastrophe. — Malcolm X

It was the world of Southern, rural, black growing up, of folks sitting on porches day and night, of folks calling your mama, 'cause you walked by and didn't speak, and of the switch waiting when you got home so that you could be taught some manners. It was a world of single black older women schoolteachers, dedicated, tough; they had taught your mama, her sisters, and her friends. They knew your people in ways that you never would and shared their insight, keeping us in touch with generations. It was a world where we had a history. — Bell Hooks

From the earliest ages of history to the present day there have never been thirteen millions of people associated in one political body who enjoyed so much freedom and happiness as the people of these United States. You have no longer any cause to fear dangers from abroad ... It is from within, among yourselves - from cupidity, from corruption, from disappointed ambition and inordinate thirst for power - that factions will be formed and liberty endangered ... — Andrew Jackson

For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to excarcerate himself from the claustral dungeon cell of his life. In the end, however, he broke beneath the weight of his aspiration. And as the years passed, the only mystery which seemed worthy of his interest, and his amazement, was that unknown day which would inaugurate his personal eternity, that incredible day on which the sun simply would not rise, and forever would begin. — Thomas Ligotti

Juliet by Ann Fortier. The Maestro (Chapter5) ... the slight nausea he was feeling must be somewhat near what God was feeling every minute of every day. If indeed He felt anything. He was, after all, a divine being, and it was entirely conceivable that divinity was incompatible with emotion. If not, then the Maestro sincerely pitied God, for the history of mankind was nothing more than a long tale of tears. — Anne Fortier

Then, out of the blue, Aaron Winer saved the day. He took her to some movie and made out with her in the back row. The next day, at school, they were boyfriend and girlfriend. Bam! Problem solved. I pretended to be bitter about this, but in fact I was so relieved that I started laughing hysterically in history class and had to be excused to go the nurse. — Jesse Andrews

I spend every day showing people the power of history. But history only has the power you give it. — Brad Meltzer

The most important fact is that gays have been here since day one. To say otherwise is a gross denial and stupidity. We played an enormous part in the history of America. — Larry Kramer

My friends, history, history calls us to this time and to this place. A solemn choice rests with us - where do we go from here? Do we move slowly and incrementally? Or do we seize the challenge of our time and tackle the great issues of our day. — Thomas Vilsack

We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied peoples joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For four long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history. — Ronald Reagan

It has been long considered possible to explain the more ancient revolutions on ... the Earth surface by means of these still existing causes; in the same manner as it is found easy to explain past events in political history, by an acquaintance with the passions and intrigues of the present day. But we shall presently see that unfortunately this is not the case in physical history:-the thread of operation is here broken, the march of nature is changed, and none of the agents that she now employs were sufficient for the production of her ancient works. — Georges Cuvier

If the history of the Day of Atonement has anything to say to us now it is: never relieve individuals of moral responsibility. The more we have, the more we grow. — Jonathan Sacks

Anthropologists have invented the ingenious, convenient, fictional notion of the "true Negro," which allows them to consider, if need be, all the real Negroes on earth as fake Negroes, more or less approaching a kind of Platonic archetype, without ever attaining it. Thus, African history is full of "Negroids," Hamites, semi-Hamites, Nilo-Hamitics, Ethiopoids, Sabaeans, even Caucasoids! Yet, if one stuck strictly to scientific data and archeological facts, the prototype of the White race would be sought in vain throughout the earliest years of present-day humanity. — Cheikh Anta Diop

The saddest day in Pixar history was when some guy said 'get Larry the Cable Guy on the phone. — Andy Kindler

Hopefully one day I can be up there with Peyton in terms of history. — Andrew Luck

In the Spring of 1962, a white postal worker from Baltimore, William Moore, decided to use his ten-day vacation to showcase his passion for Civil Rights. Moore planned a "Freedom Walk" from Chattanooga, Tennessee, across Alabama, to Jackson, Mississippi, where he would confront Governor Ross Barnett about the injustice of racial segregation. Moore, who had a history of psychiatric illness, entered Alabama wearing signs that read MISSISSIPPI OR BUST, END SEGREGATION IN AMERICA, and EQUAL RIGHTS FOR ALL MEN. The much-publicized march ended tragically, when Moore's body was found on a roadside near Gadsen, Alabama - he had been shot to death. — Jeffrey K. Smith

Anything can be an instrument, Chugurh said. Small things. Things you wouldn't even notice. They pass from hand to hand. People don't pay attention. And then one day there's an accounting. And after that nothing is the same. Well, you say. It's just a coin. For instance. Nothing special there. What could that be an instrument of? You see the problem. to separate the act from the the thing. As if the parts of some moment in history might be interchangeable with the parts of some other moment. How could that be? Well, it's just a coin. Yes. That's true. Is it? — Cormac McCarthy

According to Hugh Thomas, author of 'A History of the World', the greatest medical advance in history has been garbage collection. The greatest psychological advance in history is just around the corner and will also have to do with cleaning up. Cleaning up lies and "coming out of the closet" is getting more attention these days. Some day we will look back on these years of suffocation in bullsh*t in the same way we look back on all the years people lived in, and died from, their garbage. — Brad Blanton

So here they are, the dog-faced soldiers, the regulars, the fifty-cents-a-day professionals riding the outposts of the nation, from Fort Reno to Fort Apache, from Sheridan to Stark. They were all the same. Men in dirty-shirt blue and only a cold page in the history books to mark their passing. But wherever they rode and whatever they fought for, that place became the United States. — Frank Nugent

I dream of writing a book like LOVERS some day. It is so spare but so rich. It is history made intimate, and a masterpiece of compression. — Jhumpa Lahiri

No longer will our penises remain flaccid and unused! From now on, we fight will for every man out there who isn't getting laid when he should be! This is our day! This is our time! And, by God, we're not gonna let history condemn us to celibacy! We will make a stand! We will succeed! We will get laid! — Kevin Myers

The unchanging Man of history is wonderfully adaptable cloth by his power of endurance and in his capacity for detachment. The fact seems to be that the play of his destiny is too great for his fears and too mysterious for his understanding. Were the trump of the Last Judgement to sound suddenly on a working day the musician at his piano would go on with his performance of Beethoven's Sonata and the cobbler at his stall stick to his last in undisturbed confidence in the virtues of the leather. And with perfect propriety. For what are we to let ourselves be disturbed by an angel's vengeful music too mighty for our ears and too awful for our terrors ? Thus it happens to us to be struck suddenly by the lightning of wrath. The reader will go on reading if the book pleases him and the critic will go on criticizing with that faculty of detachment born perhaps from a sense of infinite littleness and wich is yet the only faculty that seems to assimilate man to the immortal gods. — Joseph Conrad

For better or worse, I was my father's son, and I intuited, however unclearly, that my life was inextricably bound up with his. I was who I was because of him. His blood was in my blood, his history was my history. Even my future, the person I might one day become, depended on him, because everything he'd ever seen or done or thought or felt flowed up through him and into me. — George Bishop

That is the way God sees us, you and me and everyone who has ever inched his way on this earth. He sees not our history but our destiny. Not what we once were but what we will one day become. He sees not our drizzly gray past but our sun-washed future, a rainbow full of promise arching over the whole of it. For God sees not as man sees. We see the disgusting sinner; He sees the destined saint. — Leif Hetland

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society. — Claude Levi-Strauss

Of the six men who have done most to make America the wonder and the joy she is to all of us, not one could be the citizen of a government so constituted; for Washington and Franklin and Jefferson, certainly the three mightiest leaders in our early history, were heretics in their day, Deists, as men called them; and Garrison and Lincoln and Sumner, certainly the three mightiest in these later times, would all be disfranchised by the proposed amendment. Lincoln could not have taken the oath of office had such a clause been in the Constitution. — John Chadwick

The Day of Trouble is Near — P.J. Parker

Change isn't optional, and creation isn't something that happened a long time ago and then ended. It's ongoing, and we are invited to be a part of it. The question for us is 'what will we create in this new day?' How will we make it count? How will we nourish the things that matter, and stand in the way of injustice in the small ways that add up to the arc of history? You are invited to participate in the creation of this day ... — David LaMotte

History will tell if we were really a good band or just a one day fly. — Billie Joe Armstrong

On St. Patrick's Day, the traditional Irish family would rise early and find a solitary sprig of shamrock to put on their somber Sunday best. Then they'd spend the morning in church listening to sermons about how thankful they should be that St. Patrick saved such a bunch of ungrateful sinners. Nobody wore green clothing as it was considered an unlucky color not suitable for church. — Rashers Tierney

The secretary of education recently unveiled an initiative for curriculums to place more emphasis on history and language. Within the decade, proficiency in at least three languages will be required of all American schoolchildren by graduation. And along with its other recommendations, the CDC has issued a promulgation that every U.S. citizen "unplug" for at least two hours each day.
location 6374 — Alena Graedon

As it happens I am comfortable with the Michael Laskis of this world, with those who live outside rather than in, those in whom the sense of dread is so acute that they turn to extreme and doomed commitments; I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people manage to fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the people, whether they are as accessible as alcohol and heroin and promiscuity or as hard to come by as faith in God or History.

But of course I did not mention dread to Michael Laski, whose particular opiate is History. I did suggest "depression," did venture that it might have been "depressing" for him to see only a dozen or so faces at his last May Day demonstration, but he told me that depression was an impediment to the revolutionary process, a disease afflicting only those who do not have ideology to sustain them. — Joan Didion

In the U.S., ironically, people work longer hours in the U.S. than they do in Europe or in any other industrialized country. They seem utterly oblivious to May Day, don't really know what it is - our own history. — Eric Drooker

Over and over again, people had to disobey lawful authority to follow the voice of their conscience. This obedience to God and disobedience to the State has, over and over again, happened throughout history. It is time again to cry out against our 'leaders,' to question (since it is not for us to say that they are evil) whether or not they are sane. — Dorothy Day

I am a war man in the day of war, but I am a peace man in the day of peace. — Michael Collins

THE INNER HISTORY OF A DAY No one knew the name of this day; Born quietly from deepest night, It hid its face in light, Demanded nothing for itself, Opened out to offer each of us A field of brightness that traveled ahead, Providing in time, ground to hold our footsteps And the light of thought to show the way. The mind of the day draws no attention; It dwells within the silence with elegance — John O'Donohue

Some of the greatest mathematical minds of all ages, from Pythagoras and Euclid in ancient Greece, through the medieval Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa and the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler, to present-day scientific figures such as Oxford physicist Roger Penrose, have spent endless hours over this simple ratio and its properties. But the fascination with the Golden Ratio is not confined just to mathematicians. Biologists, artists, musicians, historians, architects, psychologists, and even mystics have pondered and debated the basis of its ubiquity and appeal. In fact, it is probably fair to say that the Golden Ratio has inspired thinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathematics. — Mario Livio

The transition from dictatorship to democracy is always very difficult, and if you read a history of any country that went through this, it wasn't easy. And, you know, you don't end dictatorship one day and next day you have fully fledged democracy. — Wael Ghonim

We are a day away from making history, and a history towards the breaking of tommorrow. — Anthony Liccione