History Was Handed Quotes & Sayings

Amar was made conscious in an instant of a presence in the air, something which had been there all the time, but which he had never isolated and identified. The thing was in him, he was a part of it, as was the man opposite him, and it was a part of them; it whispered to them that time was short, that the world they lived in was approaching its end, and beyond was unfathomable darkness. It was the premonition of inevitable defeat and annihilation, and it had always been there with them and in them, as intangible and as real as the night around them. Amar pulled two loose cigarettes out of his pocket and handed one to the potter. "Ah, the Moslems, the Moslems!" he sighed. "Who knows what's going to happen to them? — Paul Bowles

Nick stopped on the sidewalk, pulled a ring from his pocket, and handed it to Kate. "Your wedding ring."
It was a platinum band inlaid with diamonds. Simple but elegant.
Kate put the ring on her finger. "That's got to be the least romantic proposal in history. Where did you steal this?"
"I bought it," he said.
"That must have been a new experience for you."
"It was. Cost me ten grand." He slipped a matching platinum band onto his finger. "I want that ring back when this marriage is over."
"No way," she said. "You can keep the dishes. — Janet Evanovich

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't. — Gloria Steinem

The life history of the individual is first and foremost an accommodation to the patterns and standards traditionally handed down in his community. — Ruth Benedict

Finally, the Steelers were backed up near their own goal line when Brister called for a draw play. He handed off to Hoge, who found himself staring into a human wall. It consisted not only of Seth Joyner but also of Jerome Brown, a defensive tackle, and Reggie White, one of the most feared defensive ends in the history of the NFL. Hoge thought: I'm gonna fuck them up. I'm gonna hit them as hard as they've ever been hit in their life. He plunged headfirst into the wall. "When I hit, I felt like my internal organs just went out my ass," he said. "It was like poof! — Mark Fainaru-Wada

The Oracle handed her a small, leather bound booklet, about as thick as a pamphlet, and said, "You are a teacher, yes?"
It was nice of the Oracle to phrase things in the form of a question and let people feel they were imparting information. "Yes, I am."
"Excellent. I know teachers value learning, and this book has very valuable information on gargoyles. If Terak remains part of your life, this you'll want to know."
Larissa weighed it in her hand. "This is a very light history."
The Oracle arched one fine brow. "Why would I bother with that? This, my dear, is about how gargoyles mate. — Danielle Monsch

Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident - and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature. — Thomas Cahill

I am not the only parent in the history of the planet to have their asses handed to them by something they could fit in a purse. — Dawn Dais

No people in all history paid a higher price for freedom. And no people have done so much to advance the dignity of man. We are called materialistic. May be so ... but our materialism has made our children the biggest, tallest, most handsome, and intelligent generations of Americans yet. They will live longer with fewer illnesses, learn more, see more of the world, and have more success in realizing their personal dreams and ambitions than any other people in any other period of our history - because of our materialism ... I think on our side of civilization and on the other side is the law of the jungle ... We all have to recognize that this country has been handed the responsibility, greater than any nation, to preserve some 6000 years of civilization against the barbarians. — Ronald Reagan

I try to be even-handed and fair-minded about my view of history. I don't romanticize one side and demonize the other, though I do think that if you're suffering a lot, especially in the Bob Marley sense, suffering becomes a kind of university out of which you'll learn some hard lessons. — Fred D'Aguiar

Pliny the Elder, the indefatigable encyclopedist of the Natural History, has barely a good word to say for them, and even that is expressed in the negative, as when he comments that 'Of the Greek sciences, it is only medicine that the Romans have not followed, thanks to their good sense,' or that 'amber provides an opportunity for exposing the false accounts of the Greeks. My readers should bear with me patiently, since it is important to realize that not everything handed down by the Greeks merits admiration. — Elizabeth Speller

I get a little sick of these New Yorkers who want me to make some psychic thing, like 'The Left-Handed Gun.' They don't know anything about Western history. — Howard Hawks

Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a lot of African innovation, experience and culture have been lost, undocumented. — Nana Awere Damoah

The truth is often so much more complicated than the digest version that's handed down to us. — Megan Smolenyak

We do not wish incorrect and unsound doctrines to be handed down to posterity under the sanction of great names, to be received and valued by future generations as authentic and reliable, ... Errors in history and doctrine, if left uncorrected by us who are conversant with the events, and who are in a position to judge of the truth or falsity of the doctrines, would go to our children as though we had sanctioned and endorsed them. — Brigham Young

It never ceased to amaze me how disinterested half the knights were in our own history, in taking advantage of the extraordinary gifts we'd been handed the night we were tapped into Rose & Grave. To them, it was just another privilege they'd been born into, like admission to Eli or their Long Island mansions. Did they have any idea how much more it was to ... other people? — Diana Peterfreund

As a child of the millennial generation, I was raised in a society in which we were under the misconception that women and men had reached equality. With the exception of very few matriarchal societies, women were more liberated than they had ever been in history. In America's middle class, basic education was practically handed to us. We have the ability to obtain a higher education and career without men. So it took me nearly a decade after becoming sexually active to realize that, as a woman, I was socially oppressed. I grew up in a world where a woman's abstinence until marriage was highly praised and if she must participate in premarital sex, to limit that activity to as few partners as possible. It was considered tacky to openly discuss my sexual encounters. I was also taught that, as a woman, I was hormonally programmed to be more emotional than men. If I had sex with a man, I was supposed to feel some sort of intimate attachment. If I didn't, I was a cruel-hearted slut. — Maggie Young

Mason is able to inspect the long Map, fragrant, elegantly cartouch'd with Indians and Instruments, at last. Ev'ry place they ran it, ev'ry House pass'd by, Road cross'd, the Ridge-lines and Creeks, Forests and Glades, Water ev'ry-where, and the Dragon nearly visible. "So, - so. This is the Line as all shall see it after its Copper-Plate 'Morphosis, - and all History remember? This is what ye expect me to sign off on?" "Not the worst I've handed in. And had they wish'd to pay for Coloring? Why, tha'd scarcely knaah the Place . . . ?" "This is beauteous Work. Emerson was right, Jeremiah. You were flying, all the time." Dixon, his face darken'd by the Years of Weather, may be allowing himself to blush in safety. "Could have us'd a spot of Orpiment, all the same. Some Lapis . . . ? — Thomas Pynchon

Civilization is not a spontaneous generation with any race or nation known to history, but the torch to be handed from race to race from age to age. — Kelly Miller

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed. — William Blum

It appears it would be quite un-American not to be suspicious of the government or to distrust it. History has taught them a little too much about the tragic frailties of human governments, but it has also driven home to them that they must control firmly political and economic power, which, handed over to any government in their land, could be easily used to oppress them. — Ndabaningi Sithole

It must be admitted that such things were common coin of the period. Kingdoms were often handed over to adolescents, whose absolute power fasinated them as might a game. Hardly grown out of the age in which it is fun to tear the wings from flies, they might now amuse themselves by tearing the heads from men. Too young to fear or even imagine death, they would not hesitate to distribute it around them. — Maurice Druon

History offers us vicarious experience. It allows the youngest student to possess the ground equally with his elders; without a knowledge of history to give him a context for present events, he is at the mercy of every social misdiagnosis handed to him. — Hilary Mantel

No greater glory can be handed down than to conquer the barbarian, to recall the savage and the pagan to civility, to draw the ignorant within the orbit of reason, and to fill with reverence for divinity the godless and the ungodly. — Richard Hakluyt

A parcel
taken from one place to another, handed from one owner to another, unwrapped and bundled up at will
is all that I am. A vessel, for the bearing of sons, for one nobleman or another: it hardly matters who. — Philippa Gregory

I can say that we are very clear in our mind about the responsibility of the national soldiers for the break with civilisation that was the Shoah. We are firmly convinced that this is something that will have to be handed over to generations to come ... so we don't see any reason to change our view of history. — Angela Merkel

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific. — Malcolm Gladwell

When Homer composed the Iliad and Odyssey, he was drawing on centuries of history and folklore handed down by oral tradition. When Nicolas Poussin painted The Rape of the Sabine Women, he was re-creating Roman history. When Marcel Proust dipped his petites madeleines into his tea, the taste and aroma set off a flood of memories and emotions from which modern literature has still not recovered. — Twyla Tharp

Perhaps the Queen's prayers, and those of Bernard, had been efficacious, or perhaps Louise had been more attentive in bed, for during 1145
the exact date is not recorded
she bore a daughter, who was named Marie in honour of the Virgin. If the infant was not the male heir to France so desired by the King
the Salic law forbade the succession of females to the throne
her arrival encouraged the royal parents to hope for a son in the future.
Relationships between aristocratic parents and children were rarely close. Queens and noblewomen did not nurse their own babies, but handed them over at birth into the care of wet nurses, leaving themselves free to become pregnant again. — Alison Weir

I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories. — John Henrik Clarke

[from Some words about 'War and Peace']

In those days also people loved, envied, sought truth and virtue, and where carried away by passions; and there was the same complex mental and moral life among the upper classes, where were in some instances even more refined than now. If we have come to believe in the perversity and coarse violence of that period, that is only because the traditions, memoirs, stories, and novels that have been handed to us, record for the most part exceptional cases of violence and brutality. To suppose that the predominant characteristic of that period was turbulence, is as unjust as it would before a man, seeing nothing but the tops of trees beyond a hill, to conclude that there was nothing to be found in that locality but trees. — Leo Tolstoy

The history of the world, as it is written and handed down by word of mouth, often fails us completely; but man's intuitive capacity, though it often misleads, does lead, does not ever abandon one. — Franz Kafka

If we look at American history, between 1942 and 1947, the data that was collected by the Census Bureau was handed over to the FBI and other organizations at the request of President Roosevelt, and that's how the Japanese were rounded up and put into the internment camps. — Michele Bachmann

Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call "history" by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds ... World historyonly comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions. — Stefan Zweig

Enrollments in American colleges tripled between 1955 and 1970, 250% in the Soviet Union, 400% in France, and more than 200% in China by 1965. Gaddis writes, What governments failed to foresee was that more young people, plus, more education, when combined with a stalemated Cold War, could be a prescription for insurrection. Learning does not easily compartmentalize. How do you prepare students to think for purposes approved by the state, or by their parents, without also equipping them to think for themselves? Youths throughout history had often wished question their elders values. Now, with university educations, their elders had handed them the training to do so. The result was discontent with the world as it was. — John Gaddis

As an African-American, as a woman, I think that I've been sensitized to the way in which history privileges the white male and the way in which certain aspects of history, the things that we are taught in school, the things that are handed down, never, never entered the picture though they might have been very important. — Rita Dove

God is an ironist. He folds the story up in unexpected ways, tying things together that we could never have imagined. He is the ironist of time, of history, of story. He, in possession of ultimate right-handed power, determined to set it all aside, and overcame evil by taking on an invincible vulnerability, inviting us to learn how to do the same. He is not just strong, but also wise in the authority of humility. And He is love, which means He overflows in sacrificial ways. But His sacrifices are not throwaways, but always come back to Him thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold. Love is fruitful, and in imitation of Him we begin to learn that the more we give, the more we have. — Douglas Wilson

Hettites appeal to us not alone because of the influence they once exercised on the fortunes of the Chosen People, not alone because a Hittite was the wife of David and the ancestress of Christ, but also on account of the debt which the civilisation of our own Europe owes to them. Our culture is the inheritance we have received from ancient Greece, and the first beginnings of Greek culture were derived from the Hittite conquerors of Asia Minor ... The Hittites carried the time-worn civilisations of Babylonia and Egypt to the furthest boundary of Asia, and there handed them over to the West in the grey dawn of European history. — A.H. Sayce

So eager were its officials that the German government had telegraphed its ambassador in St. Petersburg two declarations of war to be delivered to Russia's foreign minister: one if Russia did not reply to its ultimatum, the other rejecting the Russian reply as unsatisfactory. In his haste and confusion, the ambassador handed over both messages. — Adam Hochschild