Quotes & Sayings About How History Affects Us

There is a saying: 'The child is parent to the adult', which means whatever happens to you as a child or teenager affects the adult you become. You are forged in your history. And fiction is an incredibly important force in shaping children, and that's why fiction needs to be diverse. — Malorie Blackman

Long ago, during my apprenticeship in the wine trade, I learned that wine is more than the sum of its parts, and more than an expression of its physical origin. The real significance of wine as the nexus of just about everything became clearer to me when I started writing about it. The more I read, the more I traveled, and the more questions I asked, the further I was pulled into the realms of history and economics, politics, literature, food, community, and all else that affects the way we live. Wine, I found, draws on everything and leads everywhere. — Gerald Asher

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life. — Toni Morrison

What are your choices? Whom are your choices for? Not just for yourself. Chose now whom you will serve, and that choice is going to affect the next generation, and the next generation, and the next. Choice never affects just one person alone. It goes on and on and the effect goes out into geography and history. You are part of history and your choices become part of history. — Edith Schaeffer

What we believe affects our choices, our actions, and subsequently, our lives. The Greeks believed in thier gods, and this belief affected everything else. History is written according to what men believe, whether or not it's true. As the writer of your own history, what you believe influences the paths you take. Do you believe in something that may be a myth? I'm not talking about religious beliefs, per se. I'm talking about things you've told yourself, or things you've been told for so long that you just assume that they are true. — Amy Harmon

The extra time and trouble required to follow Dr. Bob's alternative schedule are hard to justify unless the dangers of contracting infectious diseases early in life are minimized and the dangers of vaccinating early in life are exaggerated. Much of The Vaccine Book is devoted to this minimization and exaggeration. Tetanus is not a disease that affects infants, according to Dr. Bob, Hib disease is rare, and measles is not that bad. He does not mention that tetanus kills hundreds of thousands of babies in the developing world every year, that most children will encounter the bacteria that causes Hib disease within the first two years of their lives, and that measles has killed more children than any other disease in history. — Eula Biss

Flatterers should be mistrusted, especially when they praise the dead. To seek a place in society is self-serving, but to seek one in history affects everyone. — Bauvard

THE HUMAN COMMUNITY has reached a critical point in its history. The world today forces us to accept that humanity is one. In the past, the various communities could allow themselves to think that they were separate. But today, as the recent tragic events in the United States have shown,7 what happens in one country affects many other countries. The world is becoming more and more interdependent. In the context of this new interdependence, self-interest requires us to take into account the interests of others. Without understanding and promoting the sense of our universal responsibility, our future itself is threatened. — Dalai Lama XIV

It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone - that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous ... The great masses of men, even in this inspired republic, are precisely where the mob was at the dawn of history. They are ignorant, they are dishonest, they are cowardly, they are ignoble. They know little if anything that is worth knowing, and there is not the slightest sign of a natural desire among them to increase their knowledge. — H.L. Mencken

What dazzles us in Stacy Schiff's Cleopatra are not the alluring mythologies about the evasive queen, but the astonishing if rare historical facts that Schiff has meticulously and lovingly excavated. Schiff offers not just Cleopatra's story but the story of an amazing era, one that has vanished but still affects us, questioning the way we look at myth, history, and ourselves. — Azar Nafisi

Christian communication is further impeded by the expectations of a world progressing at a staggering pace in every field of study. It seems as though to deal in spiritual matters, the Christian has to be an authority on every other subject, failing which, he is branded "escapist" or "unrealistic." Thus, science, philosophy, psychology, history, and virtually every other discipline affects religion. In a sense, this ought not to be surprising, because spiritual truth deals with the essence of life. For — Ravi Zacharias

What affects the ear and the eye has something to do with what the mind perceives; grimaces and smiles betray the mind's moods and bodily castigations lead, it is hoped, to moral improvement. But the actual transactions between the episodes of the private history ancTthose of the public history remain mysterious, since by definition they can belong to neither series. They could not be reported among the happenings described in a person's autobiography of his inner life, but nor could they be reported among those described in some one else's biography of that person's overt career. They can be inspected neither by introspection nor by laboratory experiment. They are theoretical shuttlecocks which are forever being bandied from the physiologist back to the psychologist and from the psychologist back to the physiologist. — Anonymous

But ignorance of divine revelation affects all of thought and life, from one's view toward history and philosophy, to one's interpretation of music and literature, to one's understanding of mathematics and physics. — Vincent Cheung

The basic premise of collective security was that all nations would view every threat to security in the same way and be prepared to run the same risks in resisting it. Not only had nothing like it ever actually occurred, nothing like it was destined to occur in the entire history of both the League of Nations and the United Nations. Only when a threat is truly overwhelming and genuinely affects all, or most, societies is such a consensus possible - as it was during the two world wars and, on a regional basis, in the Cold War. But in the vast majority of cases - and in nearly all of the difficult ones - the nations of the world tend to disagree either about the nature of the threat or about the type of sacrifice they are prepared to make to meet it. — Henry Kissinger

...what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history. — Mario Puzo

Slavery is something that affects all of us. It's all of our history. — John Ridley

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues. — Madeleine Albright

The moon is a satellite that was constructed. It was built and anchored outside Earth's atmosphere as a mediating and monitoring device, a supercomputer or eye in the sky. It affects all life forms on this planet, beyond what you can currently grasp. In your history there are references to two moons around earth ... — Barbara Marciniak

If your product is shaving cream, you can use the headline, "The five things you'd better know about shaving and how many different ways it affects your body." Plus, you can include tips on how to shave, the best ways to shave, and what every kid should know when it's time to shave. Cover topics such as the structure of various shaving creams and the impact that shaving has on your skin. You could even give the history of shaving. When did it start? How did it start? Who started it? Get this: if you offer all this advice and plug that Web site every where you're already promoting your product, the site becomes an information source that folks are going to send other folks to in order to get this information. So information-based marketing accelerates your reach and increases word-of-mouth — Chet Holmes

They all know the truth, that there are only three subjects worth talking about. At least here in these parts," he says, "The weather, which, as they're farmers, affects everything else. Dying and birthing, of both people and animals. And what we eat - this last item comprising what we ate the day before and what we're planning to eat tomorrow. And all three of these major subjects encompass, in one way or another, philosophy, psychology, sociology, anthropology, the physical sciences, history, art, literature, and religion. We get around to sparring about all that counts in life but we usually do it while we're talking about food, it being a subject inseparable from every other subject. It's the table and the bed that count in life. And everything else we do, we do so we can get back to the table, back to the bed. — Marlena De Blasi

Our concern for human rights comes to the fore when there are gross violations of human decencies. Then other countries, including China, must recognize that this affects the American attitude towards their country. But towards what precise institutions will it evolve? I think we ought to leave something to history. — Henry A. Kissinger

History affects our future but it doesn't determine it. — Todd Stocker

Ms Roache's been marred by politics and she doesn't realize it. Luckily, there's much more to life and to friendship than one's party affiliation. Arts, sports, food are just some of the nobler interests we may share with people. Often, the only thing we share with someone is experiences, or "history" - those are, in a sense, our deepest friendships.
Politics already affects my affairs much more extensively than I'd be willing to allow. I refuse to let it take over my social life as well. — Massimiliano Trovato

We [Americans] have a historical trauma when it comes to the past relationships when it comes to Native Americans and the history of how America was created. With this film, it's nice to see that the trauma is presented from a white male that was in the Civil War and that trauma affects him in a way that still exists. — Adam Beach

We should feel empowered by where we came from and who we are, not hide it. It is important to acknowledge that everything we do affects our ancestors as much as they have affected us. — Lorin Morgan-Richards