Perspective In History Quotes & Sayings

As the Greeks saw it, to be a man was to be defined by your ability to exert power in a world articulated through transcendent forces ultimately beyond human control. The apparent futility of this perspective was outweighed by the nobility that came with the struggle. — Thomas Van Nortwick

The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past. — Emmuska Orczy

An evolutionary perspective of our place in the history of the earth reminds us that Homo sapiens sapiens has occupied the planet for the tiniest fraction of that planet's four and a half thousand million years of existence. In many ways we are a biological accident, the product of countless propitious circumstances. As we peer back through the fossil record, through layer upon layer of long-extinct species, many of which thrived far longer than the human species is ever likely to do, we are reminded of our mortality as a species. There is no law that declares the human animal to be different, as seen in this broad biological perspective, from any other animal. There is no law that declares the human species to be immortal. — Richard E. Leakey

As populations crowd toward the ocean's edge and the sea encroaches menacingly toward the land, John R. Gillis looks at the history of the world from a fresh perspective and enables readers to see it in a new light. That he has managed to do so in a single conceptual work is nothing short of astounding. — Felipe Fernandez-Armesto

With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes. — Peter Heather

They were trying to orchestrate a revolution, which almost by definition generated a sense of collective trauma that defied any semblance of coherence and control. If we wish to rediscover the psychological context of the major players in Philadelphia, we need to abandon our hindsight omniscience and capture their mentality as they negotiated the unknown. — Joseph J. Ellis

Australia's treatment of her Aboriginal people will be the thing on which the world will judge Australia and Australians - Not just now, but in the greater perspective of history. — Gough Whitlam

The problem is that after two centuries of conflict about just who was wanted in the Australian nation the term 'Australia' both includes and excludes. There are still people for whom 'Australian' means predominatly Anglo-Celtic white people whose parents were born here before 'New Australians' came as migrants after the Second World War. A common alternative to 'white people' (who from an Aboriginal perspective might be more genially called 'whitefellas') is 'Europeans'. This makes an incongruous appeal to history. Politically the colonisers were British, but they includes people of many nationalities. It's an odd usage, as when you see a sign in a national park telling you 'Europeans' brought the invasive weeds and pests. They brought the sign and the concept of a park too, and 'they', in a complex sense, are 'us'. — Nicholas Jose

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it off today, but 100 years from now, historians will be discussing this precedent. — Megan Smolenyak

But you didn't mention Orrigar I, the first king of the House of Chaldarina. He put an end to years of unrest and civil strife. Neither did you mention Ronnick II, the one who reformed the monetary system and forbade the Great Houses to mint their own coins, thus stabilizing our currency. At the time it saved Ximerion from going bankrupt."
"I'm sorry. I told you we weren't big - "
"It's not that, Hemarchidas. You remembered the fighting kings, those who brought war, destruction and ephemeral glory. Or those who ended tragically. You forgot the wise administrators, those who kept the peace, those who brought prosperity. You needn't feel embarrassed, though. So did history."
Hemarchidas looked at his friend as if he saw him for the first time.
"So, all in all, Hemarchidas, I'd rather history forgot me. — Andrew Ashling

Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening. — Ian Mortimer

They were the good old days. Don't give up hope in the bad new
days, which will become then good old days. We appreciate Kennedy because he was killed; Martin Luther King was a great man. If you'd meet Naropa or Tilopa on the spot you'd be pissed off. History is very deceptive, reality is more important. There is a piece of philosophy for you. — Chogyam Trungpa

The present is never tidy, or certain, or reasonable, and those who try to make it so once it becomes the past succeed only in making it seem implausible. — William Manchester

The Light in the Labyrinth is a beautifully written book, a gem. I savoured every word; words written with so much 'colour'. Even though I know the story of Queen Anne Boleyn, Dunn's perspective on her last days is missing in so many other books of the genre. Dunn gives grace to the history and an honest, and very compassionate look at Anne's last days. I cried in the end, shedding tears for the young Kate, Anne and her little Bess. I have not yet read a Tudor book that has moved me to tears, as this wonderful journey does. Dunn's dedication and research shines through in this unforgettable book, a book not just for young readers, but also for all." - Lara Salzano, avid Tudor reader. — Wendy J. Dunn

Past ages come to us in new ways. For instance, they bore or disturb us. The dead say things we would or could not say in ways that appall , bless, and startle us. Reading them is part of diversity. The easiest voices to ignore are those of the dead; nevertheless, they often on the ones we need most. — John Mark Reynolds

I suppose history always did have in it a large bit of the perspective of those who wrote it. People tend to make their own truth of what was right loom larger than other truths just as true but somehow less favorable to telling. — Na'ama Yehuda

A little while ago I visited Omaha Beach for the second time in my life. In the intervening 26 years, nearly 20,000 tides had come and gone and little remains visible of the greatest military landing in man's history of endless warring. What's to be seen is mostly in a superb museum and a panoramic cemetery. The cemetery memorializes with dignity and grandeur the event and the dead, and moves one deeply. Before they die less precipitously and/or in lesser purpose, Americans who can should visit World War II's Normandy Beach. Such seeing and remembering helps a man's perspective. — Malcolm Forbes

To grow up, a man must stand apart not only from his mother but from his fellows. Human achievement, according to this perspective, is always to be measured in difference, who is the fastest, the most handsome, the richest. The quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon highlights this way of looking at human achievement. Not only do the two men compete for the most honor, symbolized by possessions, but they see their contest as a zero-sum game. That is, they - and all the other warriors - assume that there is a finite amount of honor available, so that if one man gets more, then someone else gets less.

Achilles, with his semidivine nature and abundant physical gifts, would seem to be an example of a man fully equipped for success in this system. And yet, Achilles does not prosper in the world of the poem. As he pursues honor and status among his fellows, he becomes more and more isolated, the price of distinction in a competitive society. — Thomas Van Nortwick

From the moon, the Earth is so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in that Universe, that you can block it out with your thumb. Then you realize that on that spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it right there on that little spot that you can cover with your thumb. And you realize from that perspective that you've changed forever, that there is something new there, that the relationship is no longer what it was. — Rusty Schweickart

In a few hundred years, when the history of our time will be written from a long-term perspective, it is likely that the most important event historians will see is not technology, not the Internet, not e-commerce. It is an unprecedented change in the human condition. For the first time - literally - substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices. For the first time, they will have to manage themselves. And society is totally unprepared for it. — Peter Drucker

The accumulation of facts, even if interesting in themselves, should not constitute the main part of education; these facts, whether they be of classical learning or knick-knacks of history, will be of little use unless the mind has been trained to see them in proper perspective. — Arthur Lynch

Since history is the drama of genius, its relentless surprise tempts us into designing boundaries for it, searching through it for patterns of repetition. Historians sometimes speak of trends, of cycles, of currents, of forces, as though they were describing natural events. In doing so they must dehistoricize themselves, taking a perspective from the timeless, believing that each observed history is always of others and never of themselves, that each observation is of history but not itself historical. — James P. Carse

Boethius moved from considering history from the actor's point of view to a "timeless" eternal view. From the divine perspective, nothing is ever utterly lost, because all of life is possessed by God in the eternal now. Though time was gnawing away at Boethius and stealing all he valued, God was beyond time and loss. Gaining this philosophical vantage allowed the last Roman to become one of the first men of the Middle Ages. — John Mark Reynolds

More people have more access to more readers for less money than ever before in history. It means a lot of dross; but it means a lot of very talented people can find and nurture a readership in ways that were not possible twenty years ago. From a creative perspective, that is all that writing is about. — John Hodgman

Rush Limbaugh is a principled conservative, master broadcaster and stinging social critic who has won his mammoth following through his own energy, individualism and wit. His daily radio show is the one reliable place ordinary citizens can turn to for a different perspective in the blizzard of propaganda and disinformation from the Northeastern media establishment. History will show that Limbaugh was a major force over the past decade in waking this country up from its p.c. coma. — Camille Paglia

I fear that we live in an ahistorical age in which we believe that we are so wise that we no longer need the lessons of the past, perhaps most disturbingly of all that technology has put us beyond the lessons of the past. — J. Rufus Fears

Freedom as a given seems the very antithesis of death. While we dread death, we generally consider freedom to be unequivocally positive. Has not the history of Western civilization been punctuated with yearnings for freedom, even driven by it? Yet freedom from an existential perspective is bonded to anxiety in asserting that, contrary to everyday experience, we do not enter into, and ultimately leave, a well-structured universe with an eternal grand design. Freedom means that one is responsible for one's own choices, actions, one's own life situation. Though the word responsible may be used in a variety of ways, I prefer Sartre's definition: to be responsible is to "be the author of," each of us being thus the author of his or her own life design. We are free to be anything but unfree: we are, Sartre would say, condemned to freedom. — Irvin D. Yalom

Ultimately, love is only possible for humans insofar as they can achieve some comprehension of their place and their duties and their values and their significance within the whole of life, of society, of spirituality, of history, of nature. In all merely partial or fragmentary perspectives, there necessarily remain undigested irrational factors, surds that one is merely tolerating and not truly respecting as essential and integral to the whole of what we are. — Kenny Smith

These are people whose names are lost to history, but when you have that kind of encounter, somehow you get a whole new perspective on what's of value and how to behave in the face of oppression, and the strength that any single person or a group of people can bring with their own will. — Clara Bingham

The political perspective of this book, ironically, is the progeny of the progressive potential of capitalism as an historical system. The joint possibility of universal material well-being and the democratization of society is a product of the capitalist era. But the history of capitalism is a chronicle of the tension between possibilities and limits: democracy and universal affluence in perpetual and ubiquitous conflict with class domination - itself a product of the social organization of capitalist production. — Samuel Bowles

The antidote, in so far as it is a matter of individual psychology, is to be found in history, biology, astronomy, and all those studies which, without destroying self-respect, enable the individual to see himself in his proper perspective. What is needed is not this or that specific piece of information, but such knowledge as inspires a conception of the ends of human life as a whole: art and history, acquaintance with the lives of heroic individuals, and some understanding of the strangely accidental and ephemeral position of man in the cosmos - all this touched with an emotion of pride in what is distinctively human, the power to see and to know, to feel magnanimously and to think with understanding. It is from large perceptions combined with impersonal emotion that wisdom most readily springs. — Bertrand Russell

We live in a moment in which old conflicts, much altered during their subterraneous years, have boiled up again. The struggle to own the past so that it can be made to serve contemporary interests has led to gross distortions. But it is true also that the experience of any generation is inevitably a warped lens through which to view the thought and the actions of any previous generation, especially when there is a lack of rigorous historical perspective to correct for these distortions. This second consideration may go some way toward explaining the fact that there are not two sides to what would otherwise be a great national controversy. — Marilynne Robinson

At every historical conjuncture, the present is not only present, it also encompasses a perspective on the past immanent to it - after the disintegration of the Soviet Union, say, the October Revolution is no longer the same historical event: it is (from the triumphant liberal-capitalist view) no longer the beginning of a new progressive epoch in the history of humanity, but the beginning of a catastrophic swerving off-course of history which reached its end in 1991. — Anonymous

History needs distance, perspective. Facts and events which are too well attested cease, in some sort, to be malleable. — Joseph Joubert

The Charter of the United Nations said in its preamble: "We the people determined to save succeeding generations from war ... " Can the United Nations save the world from war? The answer is No! It was conceived and created by statesmen who knew little of the significance of the biblical concept of history and the nature of man. When the perspective is wrong, the whole viewpoint will be wrong. — Billy Graham

There should be an honored place in history for statesmen whose ideas turned out to be right. — Walter Isaacson

In this scheme of things we don't create our lives; we are summoned by life. The important answers are not found inside, they are found outside. This perspective begins not within the autonomous self, but with the concrete circumstances in which you happen to be embedded. This perspective begins with an awareness that the world existed long before you and will last long after you, and that in the brief span of your life you have been thrown by fate, by history, by chance, by evolution, or by God into a specific place with specific problems and needs. Your job is to figure certain things out: What does this environment need in order to be made whole? What is it that needs repair? What tasks are lying around waiting to be performed? As the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, At what points do my talents and deep gladness meet the world's deep need? — David Brooks

Europe needs to develop a sense of collective history - we need to write books from a European perspective, to teach it in schools as well. — Bernard-Henri Levy

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world. — Michel-Rolph Trouillot

The history written, taught, and sworn to as 'the unvarnished truth' by the establishment - any establishment, left or right, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist or fascist - is generally revisionist, narrow in perspective, monolithic, and agenda-driven. In the worst case, it consists of one part denial and one part propaganda - in other words, a self-serving pack of lies. — Thomas W. Knowles

Most of us would give anything for the chance to play just one day of MLB baseball - especially for our favorite team. Well, there once was a pitcher named Bock Baker who actually got two opportunities to pitch in the big leagues. He took the mound for Cleveland against the Chicago White Sox in his big league debut. How did he fare? Well, he pitched a complete game. Pretty spectacular, right? Well, sure - but it depends on your perspective. He gave up 23 hits and 13 runs. Baker never pitched for Cleveland again, but the Philadelphia Athletics gave him a second big league start that same year (1901). He lasted juts six innings, and lost again after giving up 11 runs - and then his career was over. — Tucker Elliot

A faithful person sees life from the perspective of trust, not fear. Bedrock faith allows me to believe that, despite the chaos of the present moment, God does reign; that regardless of how worthless I may feel, I truly matter to a God of love; that no pain lasts forever and no evil triumphs in the end. Faith sees even the darkest deed of all history, the death of God's Son, as a necessary prelude to the brightest. — Philip Yancey

What did I learn and internalize from the experience? That our challenge is to let go of our old stories that defined us and forgive others and ourselves. Dropping those stories will free us from the burdens and restrictions that have prevented us from writing new ones. The spirits - our loved ones on the other side, our angels or guides, Fred - want us to do that in order to heal the deep rift in the world, so our future includes an earth that is healed and whole and tended to by her inhabitants with respect. Their message is to love without conditions, to show compassion, to be as authentic as we are able, to strip away the lies we've told ourselves, and to remember who we really are and who we came here to be. We are spiritual beings constrained by our human experience, defined at this time in history by a distorted lens of perception and perspective, in a state of spiritual amnesia and asleep at the wheel of life. It's time to wake up. — Colette Baron Reid

I expressed skepticism, in the first chapter, about the utility of time machines in historical research. I especially advised against graduate students relying on them, because of the limited perspective you tend to get from being plunked down in some particular part of the past, and the danger of not getting back in time for your orals. — John Lewis Gaddis

The stakes in this game are not low. Our enterprise is no less than the introduction of an alternative language, and with the language an altered perspective, for a group of phenomena that tradition tended to refer to with such words as 'spirituality', 'piety', 'morality', 'ethics' and 'asceticism'. If the manoeuvre succeeds, the conventional concept of religion, that ill-fated bugbear from the prop studios of modern Europe, will emerge from these investigations as the great loser. Certainly intellectual history has always resembled a refuge for malformed concepts - and after the following journey through the various stations, one will not only see through the concept of 'religion' in its failed design, a concept whose crookedness is second only to the hyper-bugbear that is 'culture'. — Peter Sloterdijk

Clive thought of his work in totality, of how varied and rich it seemed whenever he was able to raise his head and take the long perspective, how it represented in abstract a whole history of his lifetime. And still so much to do. — Ian McEwan

For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love. — John Edgar Wideman

I used to feel spiritually inferior because I had not experienced the more spectacular manifestations of the Spirit and could not point to any bona fide "miracles" in my life. Increasingly, though, I have come to see that what I value may differ greatly from what God values. Jesus, often reluctant to perform miracles, considered it progress when he departed earth and entrusted the mission to his flawed disciples. Like a proud parent, God seems to take more delight as a spectator of the bumbling achievements of stripling children than in any self-display of omnipotence.
From God's perspective, if I may speculate, the great advance in human history may be what happened at Pentecost, which restored the direct correspondence of spirit to Spirit that had been lost in Eden. I want God to act in direct, impressive, irrefutable ways. God wants to "share power" with the likes of me, accomplishing his work through people, not despite them. — Philip Yancey

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history. — Noam Chomsky

Nations tend to see the other side's war atrocities as systemic and indicative of their culture and their own atrocities as justified or the acts of stressed combatants. In my travels, I sense a smoldering resentment towards WWII Japanese behavior among some Americans. Ironically, these feelings are strongest among the younger American generation that did not fight in WWII. In my experience, the Pacific vets on both sides have made their peace. And in terms of judgments, I will leave it to those who were there. As Ray Gallagher, who flew on both atomic missions against Hiroshima and Nagasaki argues, When you're not at war you're a good second guesser. You had to live those years and walk that mile. — James D. Bradley

Looking again at the lights and the shadows, in both one's own life and in the history of the past century, gives a person perspective to face the end of life on earth in the light of eternity. — Francis George

In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos — George F. Will

I have faith in your eternal, comprehensive plan, and I believe that someday I will be able to see that you have made my life a beautiful tapestry. Right now I can see only sections of the back, with all of its knots and loose ends. But I trust that someday in heaven I will see the front in its entirety - the picture of world history and my own life from your perspective. How amazing that will be! So today give me the grace to interpret unexpected and even unwelcome circumstances as part of your grand plan. When I do, I know I'll be able to embrace both the good and the bad, knowing that you are weaving a beautiful picture with my life. — Amy E. Mason

The Bible interprets life from its particular perspective; it does not record in a factual way the human journey through history. — John Shelby Spong

With the perspective afforded by the passage of time, where does 9/11 rank as a turning point in our national history? For the victims and their families, innocents going about their lives, suddenly and brutally murdered, no other day can ever matter as much. — Jon Meacham

As you grow older and young people come up to you with their history books, you realize that some of the things I have been able to do have been impactful. But for me, I try to keep everything in perspective and stay humble. — Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Everything in physiology follows the rule that too much can be as bad as too little. There are optimal points of allostatic balance. For example, while a moderate amount of exercise generally increases bone mass, thirty-year-old athletes who run 40 to 50 miles a week can wind up with decalcified bones, decreased bone mass, increased risk of stress fractures and scoliosis (sideways curvature of the spine) - their skeletons look like those of seventy-year-olds. To put exercise in perspective, imagine this: sit with a group of hunter-gatherers from the African grasslands and explain to them that in our world we have so much food and so much free time that some of us run 26 miles in a day, simply for the sheer pleasure of it. They are likely to say, "Are you crazy? That's stressful." Throughout hominid history, if you're running 26 miles in a day, you're either very intent on eating someone or someone's very intent on eating you. — Robert M. Sapolsky

The extension of the moral-historical perspective makes the meaning of the thesis of the athletic and somatic renaissance apparent. At the transition from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, the phenomenon labelled the 'rebirth of antiquity' in the language regulations of art history entered a phase that fundamentally modified the motives of our identification with cultural relics from antiquity, even from the early classical period. Here, as we have seen, one finds a regression to a time in which the changing of life had not yet fallen under the command of life-denying asceticisms. This 'supra-epochal' time could just as easily be called the future, and what seems like a regression towards it could also be conceived of as a leap forwards. — Peter Sloterdijk

Every company has its own texture, vocabulary, and singular place in dance history, and I have always wanted to share my perspective of these world renowned institutions. — David Hallberg

When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end. — James Robertson

There is little history in the study of nature, and there is little nature in the study of history. I want to show how we can remedy that cultural lag by developing a new perspective on the historian's enterprise, one that will make us Darwinians at last. — Donald Worster

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought. — William Kristol

The Christian church has a long history of gradually absorbing scientific perspectives and new discoveries. It seems to me that, in fact, that has been one of the strengths of Christianity - it has ultimately had great flexibility in absorbing new information about the world that we get from science. — George Coyne

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him. — George Eliot

The philosopher and historian George Santayana once remarked that those who do not know their history are doomed to repeat its mistakes. A perusal of some of the essays will reveal that this is not always true. In some cases psychologists have known about mistakes of the past and sought to repeat them. But the recurrence can sometimes be fruitful: going round in circles can be a good thing, provided the circle is large that when one returns to the task one sees it in a new light and the error brings new insights. — Noel Sheehy

Your history is no less important to your survival than your ability to breathe. In the end, you can only determine whether to saturate your memories with pain or with perspective. Forgetting is not an option. I tell you the truth now: Pain was not God's plan for this life. It is a reality, but it is not a part of the plan. — Ted Dekker

I'm a geophysicist who has conducted and published climate studies in top-rank scientific journals. My perspective on Mr. Inhofe and the issue of global warming is informed not only by my knowledge of climate science but also by my studies of the history and philosophy of science. — David Deming

History is boring, unless you see it from the right perspective. perspective is important.
Corn growing in a field appears orderless, till one turns the corner and sees the rows line up. a pixelized photo is unrecognizable, till one zooms out. All the the numbers are on a combination lock but it will not open till they are in the right sequence.
So it is with history - all the names, dates and places are there, but it is not until they are seen from the right perspective that lessons become clear. history is boring, until it comes into focus. — William J. Federer

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot. — Simon Schama

To put this even more bluntly, one might think about the difference between adding traditional and contemporary Indigenous art to the National Gallery of Canada's historical Canadian wing and imagining the entire gallery curated from an Indigenous perspective of what a "National Gallery of Canada" might mean.37 Put slightly differently, the project of Indigenous representation in the gallery in Canada has been defined as "bringing aboriginal art in to the history of Canadian art" rather than of incorporating settler history into the history of Aboriginal art.38 Would such reimaginings mean, for example, a move away from the primacy of a liberal politic and of the artist genius as a cultural application of that politic? — Lynda Jessup

I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a fact is against them, it's usually because it's the truth. No one tries to step outside of the edge of reason. No one tries to step beyond the edge of the world. — Lionel Suggs

The planetary perspective provides a kind of out of body experience for us - hovering in orbit and watching ourselves sleepwalk through a slow disaster of our own making. Now, can this experience help us to shake ourselves awake? For virtually all of its history Earth has evolved without us, and we have always seen ourselves as autonomous actors on a passive planetary backdrop. But now we are beginning to see that our futures - those of humanity and of planet Earth - are tightly conjoined. If human civilization is to persist and thrive we will need a completely different view of our planet, and of ourselves, in which we acknowledge both our deep dependence and our increasing influence. — David Grinspoon

The focus of history and philosophy of science scholar Arthur Miller's (2010) "137: Jung and Pauli and the Pursuit of Scientific Obsession" is Jung and Pauli's
mutual effort to discover the cosmic number or fine structure constant, which is a fundamental physical constant dealing with electromagnetism, or, from a different perspective, could be considered the philosopher's stone of the mathematical universe.
This was indeed one of Pauli and Jung's collaborative passions, but it was not the only concentration of their relationship. Quantum physics could be seen as the natural progression from ancient alchemy, through chemistry, culminating in the abstract world of subatomic particles, wave functions, and mathematics. [Ancient Egypt and Modern Psychotherapy] — Todd Hayen

[French Revolution rejected] the sacred foundation both of history and of the state. History was no longer measured on the basis of an idea of God that had preceded it and given it shape. The state came to be understood in purely secular terms, based on rationalism and the will of citizens.
The secular state arose for the first time, abandoning and excluding any divine guarantee or legitimation of the political element as a mythological vision of the world and declaring that God is a private question that does not belong to the public sphere or to the democratic formation of the public will. Public life was now considered the realm of reason alone, which had no place for a seemingly unknowable God. From this perspective, religion and faith in God belonged to the realm of sentiment, not of reason. God and His will therefore ceased to be relevant to public life. — Pope Benedict XVI

Not every murderer is known, not every death is recorded, not every human being in the history of mankind is remembered and not every God's name is memorised by me. That doesn't mean they don't exist, Dr.Mukherjee. — Sambhav Ratnakar

Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise that sometimes things take a long time to change. If you look at your history in this country, you find that for most rights, people had to struggle. People in this era forget that and quite often think they are entitled, and are weary of struggling over any period of time — Winona LaDuke

Peter Aykroyd has a wonderful eye for the telling detail, cameos that stick in the mind. Thse are the little touches that make it past come alive. — J.J. Scarisbrick

From a reality perspective, I'm sure part of that is true, but this is the largest blackout in U.S. history. If that is not a signal that we have got a problem that needs to be fixed, I don't know what is. — Jennifer Granholm

Language itself is so value-laden as to render value-neutrality almost impossible. Growing up in England I was introduced to the American Revolution by a 'footnote' to colonial history about the 'revolt' of the American colonies. Word choice and the organization of material gave the game away. — Arthur F. Holmes

There remains an experience of incomparable value ... to see the great events of world history from below; from the perspective of the outcast, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed, the reviled
in short, from the perspective of those who suffer ... to look with new eyes on matters great and small. — Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I think a lot of Civil War stuff is written - As they say, history is written by the victors. And one of the things that I think is fascinating about this from a purely dramatic perspective is whether someone is right or wrong, you understand where they're coming from in this. — Josh Radnor

It is always dangerous to declare a turning point in history. We always tend to feel that, when we are alive, something really major is happening. — Thomas L. Friedman

The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power — Chris Hedges

Only by embracing the lessons embedded in our city's history can we avoid repeating the failed policies of both the recent and distant past, and have true clarity about what action is required to correct today's public policies. Recurring themes emerge throughout the history of New York City with regards to public policy. Even though the city has changed immensely, these themes are important for debating policy and giving us an informed perspective on how to move forward. — Ralph Da Costa Nunez

Not enough books focus on how a culture responds to radically new ideas or discovery. Especially in the biography genre, they tend to focus on all the sordid details in the life of the person who made the discovery. I find this path to be voyeuristic but not enlightening. Instead, I ask, After evolution was discovered, how did religion and society respond? After cities were electrified, how did daily life change? After the airplane could fly from one country to another, how did commerce or warfare change? After we walked on the Moon, how differently did we view Earth? My larger understanding of people, places and things derives primarily from stories surrounding questions such as those. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion. — Agatha Christie

THE HERETIC'S DAUGHTER is raw, honest and completely captivating. Kathleen Kent takes what would seem to be a familiar subject and gives it a fresh, new perspective-moving us through a wrenching gamut of emotions as she does so. A searing look at one of the worst periods in our history. — Anita Shreve

The educated man, habitually, almost without noticing it, sees the present as something that grows out of a long perspective of centuries. In my the minds of my RAF hearers this perspective simply did not exist. It seemed to me that they did not really believe that we have any reliable knowledge of historic man. But this was often curiously combined with a conviction that we knew a great deal about Prehistoric Man: doubtless because Prehistoric Man is labelled "Science" (which is reliable) whereas Napoleon or Julius Caesar is labelled as "History" (which is not. — C.S. Lewis

Lewis was studying literary history with the present and future in mind. — Philip Zaleski

The sculptor, and the painter also, should be trained in these liberal arts: grammar, geometry, philosophy, medicine, astronomy, perspective, history, anatomy, theory of design, arithmetic. — Lorenzo Ghiberti

Here and there, in some older houses, old faded daguerreotypes still hang on the walls ... They seem to us to be very simple ... compared with the artistic and skillful portraits made in later days ... Here was a photograph that at one time had been the last word, a very modern portrait ... Today it is just a part of cultural history. The small yellowed surface has acquired depth, an admonishing perspective. We hold in our hand a symbol of the structure and ideology of an epoch. — Isak Dinesen

My ancestors were conquerors, though now they are heroes in our history." Glancing at Amos, he said, "But we wrote the history. — Raymond E. Feist

[talking about the Holocaust]
'But to put something in context is a step towards saying it can be understood and that it can be explained. And if it can be explained that it can be explained away.'
'But this is History. Distance yourselves. Our perspective on the past alters. Looking back, immediately in front of us is dead ground. We don't see it, and because we don't see it this means that there is no period so remote as the recent past. And one of the historian's jobs is to anticipate what our perspective of that period will be ... even on the Holocaust. — Alan Bennett

My key to living an inspired life involves Embracing my history, Understanding the function of expectations and gently learning to have none; Recognizing the power of attentive and conscious choices. In all circumstances I acknowledge this, IN ALL THINGS AND ALL WAYS, I HAVE CHOICE. My choice resides in my perspective. While I certainly do not control climate and markets and roadways and others, I do control myself and my response to all those circumstances. I do indeed. — Mary Anne Radmacher

There are [in Hollywood] some endemic problems and some things that happen over and over again. There's the problem of representation of basically anybody but white men. These are things that we talk about a lot in contemporary culture, and it's interesting to me to go look at film history from the perspective of today. — Karina Longworth

If a reader believes that everything in nonfiction or history is just objectively true, I don't really know what to tell them, except that at least in fiction, the choice of what perspective and bias to tell a given story from - which is always a deliberate choice - is foregrounded and clear. — Kathleen Rooney

Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that - in my humble opinion - allows us to put the present into much better perspective. — Mohsin Hamid

Religion mattered at a deep level, which must help to explain why none of these people went over to Islam; but in most cases it did not direct their lives, nor did it prevent some of them from cultivating their connection with a powerful relative who was a Muslim convert. Whilst the fact that they were Catholics from one of Christendom's frontier zones may have given them an enhanced sense of their Catholicism, the fact that they were Albanians, connected by language, blood and history to Ottoman subjects and Ottoman territory, gave them an ability to see things also from something more like an Ottoman perspective — Noel Malcolm

The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the whole Universe on the principle of extrapolated matter analyses.To explain - since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake. The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so basically in order to annoy his wife. — Douglas Adams