Post History Quotes & Sayings

Just the other day, I was in my neighborhood Starbucks, waiting for the post office to open. I was enjoying a chocolatey cafe mocha when it occurred to me that to drink a mocha is to gulp down the entire history of the New World. From the Spanish exportation of Aztec cacao, and the Dutch invention of the chemical process for making cocoa, on down to the capitalist empire of Hershey, PA, and the lifestyle marketing of Seattle's Starbucks, the modern mocha is a bittersweet concoction of imperialism, genocide, invention, and consumerism served with whipped cream on top. — Sarah Vowell

From now on there is no longer any development immanent to art. The times have passed for history of art with a logical sense. There is no longer even any consistency in absurdities; the development has been wound up, and what comes now already exists: the syncretism of a muddle of all styles and possibilities, post-history. — Arnold Gehlen

I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another. — Stephen Daldry

History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind. — Elizabeth Hardwick

All history is one continuous pestilence. There is no truth and there is no illusion. There is nowhere to appeal and nowhere to go. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

People from the military have been inside that thing. If I went back in time, I wouldn't necessarily be thinking geopolitically, but maybe they would. That has to be half the reason why they're funding us in the first place. Maybe there were earlier versions of history where Republicans didn't vote to pulp all those Andrew Jackson twenties and replace them with bills that had portraits of Reagan. Maybe in the first version of post-Point Zero history, insurgents in North and South Dakota didn't attempt to secede; maybe we weren't fighting enemies both here and in the Middle East. Or maybe there was a full-on civil war going on in the United States and the current state of affairs is an improvement. We don't know. We can't know. And we can't know the extent to which any of us, sitting here at this table, is responsible. — Dexter Palmer

If humans one day become extinct from a catastrophic collision, there would be no greater tragedy in the history of life in the universe. Not because we lacked the brain power to protect ourselves but because we lacked the foresight. The dominant species that replaces us in post-apocalyptic Earth just might wonder, as they gaze upon our mounted skeletons in their natural history museums, why large-headed Homo sapiens fared no better than the proverbially pea-brained dinosaurs. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

What prompts so many commentators to speak of the 'end of
history', of post-modernity, 'second modernity' and 'surmodernity',
or otherwise to articulate the intuition of a radical change in the
arrangement of human cohabitation and in social conditions under
which life-politics is nowadays conducted, is the fact that the long
effort to accelerate the speed of movement has presently reached its
'natural limit' . — Zygmunt Bauman

I'm interested in Russian language, culture, history ... and I lived there, for four years, as a reporter for the Washington Post and have visited many times since. — David Remnick

In the post-Watergate atmosphere of 1975 and 1976, the just-plain-folks personalities of both Ford and Carter seemed the perfect antidote to Nixon's arrogant, isolated presidency. But as alert history-minded readers know, Ford and Carter were both rebuffed by voters in their efforts to hold on to the presidency. — Jeff Greenfield

[The] Japanese were a people in a profound, inverse, reverse, or if I preferred it, even perverse sense, more in love with death than living. — Sir Laurens Van Der Post

Toward the end of the Second World War, a
new consciousness arose amongst the public
and policy makers of the Western World. After
ten years of crippling economic depression
and another five at war, the public demanded
something new from their disintegrating
urban environments. — Lucas Mascotto-Carbone

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics. — David Frum

As for the third Official Reason: exposing Western Hypocrisy - how much more exposed can they be? Which decent human being on earth harbors any illusions about it? These are people whose histories are spongy with the blood of others. Colonialism, apartheid, slavery, ethnic cleansing, germ warfare, chemical weapons - they virtually invented it all. — Arundhati Roy

Humans have been doin' awful things to each other throughout history. Humanity's not as great as you make it out to be. I do what needs to be done, and that's that. We're about to go to war, Earl. There ain't no humanity in war. — Michael Monroe

We have survived the "Death of God" and the "Death of Man". We will surely survive "the Death of History" ... and the death of post-modernism. — Norman Davies

At first I wanted to go to university, but I really didn't dare to. I was too self-conscious, being a working-class kid. It was really difficult. I was going to study history, but the professor asked me some questions I didn't understand, and I didn't dare to ask what they meant. I left university and went to work in the Post. — Per Petterson

No one has ever been modern. Modernity has never begun. There has never been a modern world. The use of the past perfect tense is important here, for it is a matter of a retrospective sentiment, of a rereading of our history. I am not saying that we are entering a new era; on the contrary we no longer have to continue the headlong flight of the post-post-postmodernists; we are no longer obliged to cling to the avant-garde of the avant-garde; we no longer seek to be even cleverer, even more critical, even deeper into the 'era of suspicion'. No, instead we discover that we have never begun to enter the modern era. Hence the hint of the ludicrous that always accompanies postmodern thinkers; they claim to come after a time that has not even started! — Anonymous

[On Jason Mashak's book SALTY AS A LIP, as reviewed in The Prague Post:] Mashak amalgamates various national, historical and religious traditions into a myth-mash that illuminates many sects' fanatical compartmentalizing, and the fact that so many religions and philosophies share similar goals, if not roots. — Stephan Delbos

The appeal to the 'natural' is one of the most powerful aspects of common-sense thinking but it is a way of understanding social relations which denies history and the possibility of change for the future. — Chris Weedon

Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths."
How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for. — Aditya Chakrabortty

Kennedy's immigration law was enacted during the magical post-1964 period, when Congress had free rein to push through the craziest left-wing legislation since the New Deal. It was the most destructive period in American history. — Ann Coulter

I had no way of predicting that Selma to Montgomery was indeed to be the last great civil rights march of the era, and that everything afterward would indeed by 'post-civil rights. — Junius Williams

Given currency by Jrgen Habermas in the late l980s, 'constitutional patriotism' has emerged as an appealing principle for post-national political allegiance. Jan-Werner Mller traces the long postwar history of the concept, takes honest account of the conservative critiques it has provoked, but proposes that it can serve as a robust norm for European Union citizenship. This is a profound meditation with real importance for contemporary political society. — Charles S. Maier

The invariable question, asked only half-mockingly of reporters by editors at the Post (and then up the hierarchical line of editors) was 'What have you done for me today?' Yesterday was for the history books, not newspapers.
Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward — Carl Bernstein

Histhry is a post-mortem examination. It tellsye what a counthry died iv. But I'd like to know what it lived iv. — Finley Peter Dunne

Human rights, dissidence, antiracism, SOS-this, SOS-that: these are soft, easy, post coitum historicum ideologies, 'after-the-orgy' ideologies for an easy-going generation which has known neither hard ideologies nor radical philosophies. The ideology of a generation which is neo-sentimental in its politics too, which has rediscovered altruism, conviviality, international charity and the individual bleeding heart. Emotional outpourings, solidarity, cosmopolitan emotiveness, multi-media pathos: all soft values harshly condemned by the Nietzschean, Marxo-Freudian age ... A new generation, that of the spoilt children of the crisis, whereas the preceding one was that of the accursed children of history. — Jean Baudrillard

Reading, like other types of art appreciation, is intensely personal. So what appeals to people is going to depend on who they are. It depends on what is happening in their life at any given moment. On what has happened to them over the course of their personal history and what makes them feel any number of things. The value of art, when it comes to being appreciated by the beholder makes the person consuming it part of that process. Failing to appreciate that integral part of the process is done at your own peril.
[*Pulls Ranty Pants Up* In Which Lauren Dane Discusses Art, Publishing, Trash and Writing What you Want, Blog Post, May 16, 2013] — Lauren Dane

This used to be a commercial building," says Fernando, "but Erudite converted it into a school, for post-Choosing education. After the major renovations in Erudite headquarters about a decade ago
you know, when all the buildings across from Millennium were connected?
they stopped teaching there. Too old, hard to update."
"Thanks for the history lesson," says Christina. — Veronica Roth

The implicit optimism of the [field service post card] is worth noting - the way it offers no provision for transmitting news like "I have lost my left leg" or "I have been admitted into hospital wounded and do not expect to recover." Because it provided no way of saying "I am going up the line again," its users had to improvise. Wilfred Owen had an understanding with his mother that when he used a double line to cross out "I am being sent down to the base," he meant he was at the front again. Close to brilliant is the way the post card allows one to admit to no state of health between being "quite" well, on the one hand, and, on the other, being so sick that one is in hospital. — Paul Fussell

Indeed, the future is signalled in the past, but time has to pass to see it. Art is the witness.
BLOG post-Perpetual Beginning-November 14 2011 — Kathryn Brimblecombe-Fox

In my view, far from deserving condemnation for their courageous reporting, the New York Times, the Washington Post and other newspapers should be commended for serving the purpose that the Founding Fathers saw so clearly. — Hugo Black

Vincent Gallo has put a curse on my colon and a hex on my prostate. He called me a 'fat pig' in the New York Post and told the New York Observer I have 'the physique of a slave-trader.' He is angry at me because I said his 'The Brown Bunny' was the worst movie in the history of the Cannes Film Festival ...
it is true that I am fat, but one day I will be thin, and he will still be the director of 'The Brown Bunny.' — Roger Ebert

History will judge the war against Iraq not by the brilliance of its military execution, but by the effectiveness of the post-hostilities activities. — Rajiv Chandrasekaran

We live in a post-authentic world, and today authenticity is a house of mirrors. It's all just what you're bringing when the lights go down. It's your teachers, your influences, and your personal history. At the end of the day, it's the power and purpose of your music that still matters. — Bruce Springsteen

What's interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you're actually going to make history worse. — Gavriel David Rosenfeld

A cherry pie is ... ephemeral. From the moment it emerges from the oven it begins a steep decline: from too hot to edible to cold to stale to mouldy, and finally to a post-pie state where only history can tell you that it was once considered food. The pie is a parable of human life. — Nick Harkaway

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation. — Simon Schama

Pretty soon, I'll be decomposing into phosphorous, calcium, and so on. Who else will you find to tell you the truth? All that's left are the archives. Pieces of paper. And the truth is... I worked at an archive myself, I can tell you first hand: paper lies even more than people do. — Svetlana Alexievich

I lost a girlfriend when I was in my 30s. She was 46. It all sounds so trite, but I put a Post-it on my dressing-room wall. It said, 'The past is history. The future is a mystery. This moment is a gift, which is why it's called the present.' — Samantha Bond

The history of a movement, the history of a nation, the history of a race is the guide-post of that movement's destiny, that nation's destiny, that race's destiny. — Marcus Garvey

My work since the late '80s specifically questioned what was presented as the 'natural' order of things in the history of post-war-N.Y. painting. — Deborah Kass

In running over the pages of our history for seven hundred years, we shall scarcely find a single great event which has not promoted equality of condition. The Crusades and the English wars decimated the nobles and divided their possessions: the municipal corporations introduced democratic liberty into the bosom of feudal monarchy; the invention of fire-arms equalized the vassal and the noble on the field of battle; the art of printing opened the same resources to the minds of all classes; the post-office brought knowledge alike to the door of the cottage and to the gate of the palace; and Protestantism proclaimed that all men are alike able to find the road to heaven. The discovery of America opened a thousand new paths to fortune, and led obscure adventurers to wealth and power. — Alexis De Tocqueville

We're well past the end of the century when time, for the first time, curved, bent, slipped, flash forwarded, and flashed back yet still kept rolling along. We know it all now, with our thoughts traveling at the speed of a tweet, our 140 characters in search of a paragraph. We're post-history. We're post-mystery. — Ali Smith

Only if we understand our past, can we move forward to a brighter future. — Barbara Post-Askin

Take the very word "etiquette." From the French for "little signs," it also connotes "social rules" both in French and in English. In fact, the two meanings share a history. King Louis XIV of France needed to give his nobles a bit of help behaving properly at his palace at Versailles, so little signs were posted telling them what was what - social dos and don'ts for dummies, so to speak. — Daniel Post Senning

Colinialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natrual resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply. — Frantz Fanon

If you don't recognize your own crimes, there's no impediment to continuing them. There's a pretty dramatic example of that right at this moment. This happens to be the fiftieth anniversary of John F. Kennedy's decision to launch the war against South Vietnam. Forgetting the fiftieth anniversary of the launching of one of the major atrocities in post-Second World War history is pretty severe. But almost nobody has noticed it. I don't think we'll hear a word about it. And, yes, that opens the way to further aggression. — Noam Chomsky

Let those flatter, who fear; it is not an American art.61 To give praise which is not due might be well from the venal, but would ill beseem those who are asserting the rights of human nature. ... Open your breast, sire, to liberal and expanded thought. Let not the name of George the third be a blot in the page of history. ... The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. Only aim to do your duty, and mankind will give you credit where you fail. No longer persevere in sacrificing the rights of one part of the empire to the inordinate desires of another; but deal out to all equal and impartial right. ... This is the important post in which fortune has placed you, holding the balance of a great, if a well poised empire. — Jon Meacham

Adolf Hitler and his Brownshirts had surged to power. Now they held Germany by the throat. The Gestapo was rapidly creating a cruel and brutal police state that treated all but true Aryans like dogs and swine. That was certainly true for Jews like the Weisz family. In just the last few years, they and all of the Jewish families in Germany had been stripped of their citizenship and denied many of their most basic rights. Jacob's father, an esteemed professor of German history, had been summarily fired from his prestigious post at Frederick William University in Berlin. The Weisz family had been forced out of their beautiful, spacious home in the suburbs of the capital. They'd had a big red J stamped on their official papers and had been denied permission to leave the country. So they had left Berlin and made a new home in Siegen. — Joel C. Rosenberg

For starters, this country embodies something utterly unique: History's first democratic empire. Beginning in the post war era, we have used free trade and democracy to create a series of interlocking relationships that end war. — Armstrong Williams

In his study of Atlanta over the last 60 years, Kevin Kruse convincingly describes the critical connections between race, Sun Belt suburbanization, the rise of the new Republican majority. White Flight is a powerful and compelling book that should be read by anyone interested in modern American politics and post-World War II urban history. — Dan Carter

We have learned the lines of good taste through history and our sense of guilt, be it post-colonial or post-Holocaust. — Patrick Chappatte

If you write a post and put it on a blog, that's a historical document. If you change your template, then that entry looks completely different. It's the same words, but not the same meaning. This all depends on what historical questions that people will be asking and we can't know what they will want. — Joshua Greenberg

These include Philip Marshall Dale, Medical Biographies: The Ailments of Thirty-Three Famous Persons (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1952); Brian Dillon, The Hypochondriacs: Nine Tormented Lives (New York: Faber and Faber, 2010); Douglas Goldman et al., Retrospective Diagnoses of Historical Personalities as Viewed by Leading Contemporary Psychiatrists (Bloomfield, NJ: Schering Corporation, 1958); Kay Redfield Jamison, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (New York: Free Press, 1993); Jeffrey A. Kottler, Divine Madness: Ten Stories of Creative Struggle (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006); Philip Mackowiak, Post-Mortem: Solving History's Great Medical Mysteries (Philadelphia: American College of Physicians, 2007); Roy Porter, Madness: A Brief History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002); David Rettew, Child Temperament: New Thinking About the Boundary Between Traits and Illness (New York: W. W. Norton, 2013). Articles — Claudia Kalb

To come to England in the 1970s was to return to this strange other-world of half-known history. I found the imperial architecture curiously familiar: the post office, the town hall, the botanic gardens. — Romesh Gunesekera

Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you read, you are limiting yourself. You need to get a good overall sense of English literary history, so you can write out of that knowledge. — Theodora Goss

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its 'self-help' section: 'For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it. — Roger Ebert