Quotes & Sayings About Study Of History

Forgetting myself for a moment, I stopped to study the menu that was elegantly exposed in a show window. I read, realizing that a few days earlier I could have gone in and ordered anything on the menu. But now, though I was the same person with the same appetite, the same appreciation and even the same wallet, no power on earth could get me inside this place for a meal. I recalled hearing some Negro say, "You can live here all your life, but you'll never get inside one of the great restaurants except as a kitchen boy." The Negro often dreams of things separated from him only by a door, knowing that he is forever cut off from experiencing them. — John Howard Griffin

From the ghetto to the mansion, from community leader to prisoner on death row, man wonders if there is a God. And if there is, what is He like? Whatever period of history we study, whatever culture we examine, if we look back in time we see all peoples, primitive or modern, acknowledging some kind of deity. Some people give up the pursuit of God in frustration, calling themselves "atheists" or "agnostics," professing to be irreligious. — Billy Graham

We can study the whole history of salvation, we can study the whole of Theology, but without the Spirit we cannot understand. It is the Spirit that makes us realize the truth or - in the words of Our Lord - it is the Spirit that makes us know the voice of Jesus. — Pope Francis

Our remarks above indicate the depth and complexity of the traditional and applied qualitative research perspectives into which a socially situated researcher enters. These traditions locate the researcher in history, simultaneously guiding and constraining work that will be done in any specific study. This field has been constantly characterized by diversity and conflict, and these are its most enduring traditions (see Levin & Greenwood, — Norman K. Denzin

For it is the duty of an astronomer to compose the history of the celestial motions through careful and expert study. — Nicolaus Copernicus

Like every man who appears at an epoch which is historical and rendered famous by his works, Jesus Christ has a history, a history which the church and the world possess, and which, surrounded by countless memorials, has at least the same authenticity as any other history formed in the same countries, amidst the same peoples and in the same times. As, then, if I would study the lives of Brutus and Cassius, I should calmly open Plutarch, I open the Gospel to study Jesus Christ, and I do so with the same composure. — Jean-Baptiste Henri Lacordaire

The argument is that Black History Month dwells too much on the downside of white America's relationship to its brothers of African heritage, slavery and torture and the like, and ignores the work of all the good white folk through the years who were nice to black people (did you know it was a white teacher who first suggested George Washington Carver study horticulture?). — Matt Taibbi

We study the past history, with the conscience of the present environmental changes; we can only predict the future ecological changes, by emergence of the past into the present. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In my own work, I'd say I'm a classicist, but I look everywhere for my solutions. I don't study the toilet-living habits of my clients, although that's a popular approach. First, I think of every building in history that has been similar in purpose. Then I think of the functional program - that's a major part of the study. — Philip Johnson

If I were a headmaster, I would get rid of the history teacher and get a chocolate teacher instead and my pupils would study a subject that affected all of them. — Roald Dahl

What the study of history and artistic creation have in common is a mode of forming images. — Johan Huizinga

Power is always personal: any study of a Western democratic leader today reveals that, even in a transparent system with its short periods in office, personalities shape administrations. Democratic leaders often rule through trusted retainers instead of official ministers. In any court, power is as fluid as human personality. — Simon Sebag Montefiore

If there's one thing that a study of history has taught us, it is that things can always get worse. — Neil Gaiman

Lady Jane Gray, who tho' inferior to her lovely Cousin the Queen of Scots, was yet an amiable young woman & famous for reading Greek while other people were hunting ... Whether she really understood that language or whether such a study proceeded only from an excess of vanity for which I beleive she was always rather remarkable, is uncertain. — Jane Austen

In the history of extra-biblical study and research tools there has never before been a resource as useful as the Puritan Hard Drive. — Paul Washer

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! — Charles Darwin

I'm sure that someday children in schools will study the history of the men [sic] who made war as you study an absurdity. They'll be shocked, just as today we're shocked with cannibalism. — Golda Meir

You're told that you're supposed to go to college, but you're also told that you are being self-indulgent if you actually want to get an education. As opposed to what? Going into consulting isn't self-indulgent? Going into finance isn't self-indulgent? Going into law, like most of the people who do, in order to make yourself rich, isn't self-indulgent? It's not okay to study history, because what good does that really do anyone, but it is okay to work for a hedge fund. It's selfish to pursue your passion, unless it's also going to make you a lot of money, in which case it isn't selfish at all. — William Deresiewicz

Let us not, in the pride of our superior knowledge, turn with contempt from the follies of our predecessors. The study of the errors into which great minds have fallen in the pursuit of truth can never be uninstructive. As the man looks back to the days of his childhood and his youth, and recalls to his mind the strange notions and false opinions that swayed his actions at the time, that he may wonder at them; so should society, for its edification, look back to the opinions which governed ages that fled. — Charles Mackay

The great wars of the present age are the effects of the study of history. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Students who take Latin are more proficient and earn higher scores on the verbal SAT exam. The business world has long recognized the importance of a rich vocabulary and rates it high as evidence of executive potential and success. Understanding the etymological history of a word gives the user vividness, color, punch, and precision. It also seems that the clearer and more numerous our verbal images, the greater our intellectual power. Wheelock's Latin is profuse with the etymological study of English and vocabulary enrichment. Our own experiences have shown that students will not only remember vocabulary words longer and better when they understand their etymologies, but also will use them with a sharper sense of meaning and nuance. — Frederic M. Wheelock

The study of tavern history often brings to light much evidence of sad domestic changes. Many a cherished and beautiful home, rich in annals of family prosperity and private hospitality, ended its days as a tavern. — Alice Morse Earle

History and literature rebuke our self-sufficiency; that's one reason why we ought to study them. It's not so much that people of olden times were the finest exemplars of higher humanity, for they too fell short of their ideals, as must all who aspire to higher things--that's what ideals are for. It's that we have abandoned those ideals once animating our civilization, refusing to learn them anew with each generation. We have assumed their transfer to be automatic. We have not indeed jettisoned the hope and drive that keep us working for a better world (that's the good news), but we have forgotten to cultivate ourselves as individuals. — Tracy Lee Simmons

We listen to rap lyrics, but few study the history. One of the most significant contributions of hip hop. It offers a profound social commentary on the black experience. This is an aspect of the music that is overlooked because most people choose to pay more attention to "the hook" (the catchy repetitive phrase) than the complete body of work. In doing so, the listener misses the message: the essence of the music, the breakdown of the bars. That's tantamount to someone who is able to quote scripture, but has never read the bible. — Carlos Wallace

Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present. — Herbert Butterfield

The comfortable thing about the study of history is that it inclines us to think hopefully of our own times. — Agnes Repplier

I used to walk out, at night, to the breakwater which divides the end of the harbor form the broad moor of the salt marsh. There was nothing to block the wind that had picked up speed and vigor from its Atlantic crossing. I'd study the stars in their brilliant blazing, the diaphanous swath of the milk Way, the distant glow of Boston backlighting the clouds on the horizon as if they'd been drawn there in smudgy charcoal. I felt, perhaps for the first time, particularly American, embedded in American history, here at the nation's slender tip. Here our westering impulse, having flooded the continent and turned back, finds itself face to face with the originating Atlantic, November's chill, salt expanses, what Hart Crane called the "unfettered leewardings," here at the end of the world. — Mark Doty

We're here for such a short time. When your great-great-grandkids study history, don't you want them to be proud that you were part of the solution? — Matt Damon

That is the supreme value of history. The study of it is the best guarantee against repeating it. — John Buchan

Those parts of history that would undermine the vision of the Left - which prevails in our education system from elementary school to postgraduate study - are not likely to get much attention. — Thomas Sowell

Our mind has its history, just as our body has its history. You might be just as astonished that man has an appendix, for instance. Does he know he ought to have an appendix? He is just born with it ... Our unconscious mind, like our body, is a storehouse of relics and memories of the past. A study of the structure of the unconscious collective mind would reveal the same discoveries as you make in comparative anatomy. We do not need to think that there is anything mystical about it. — Carl Jung

The philosophical study of nature endeavors, in the the vicissitudes of phenomena, to connect the present with the past. — Alexander Von Humboldt

I wouldn't live in a colony like that, myself, for a thousand dollars an hour. I wouldn't want it next door. I'm not too happy it's within ten miles. Why? Because their soft-headedness irritates me. Because their beautiful thinking ignores both history and human nature. Because they'd spoil my thing with their thing. Because I don't think any of them is wise enough to play God and create a human society. Look. I like privacy, I don't like crowds, I don't like noise, I don't like anarchy, I don't even like discussion all that much. I prefer study, which is very different from meditation-not better, different. I don't like children who are part of the wild life. So are polecats and rats and other sorts of hostile and untrained vermin. I want to make a distinction between civilization and the wild life. I want a society that will protect the wild life without confusing itself with it. — Wallace Stegner

Biology is a science of three dimensions. The first is the study of each species across all levels of biological organization, molecule to cell to organism to population to ecosystem. The second dimension is the diversity of all species in the biosphere. The third dimension is the history of each species in turn, comprising both its genetic evolution and the environmental change that drove the evolution. Biology, by growing in all three dimensions, is progressing toward unification and will continue to do so. — E. O. Wilson

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties. — Terry Eagleton

I've written almost 200 songs with Bad Religion. No matter where you look in our history, the focus has been trying to instill some of these disturbing realities about the world, some of the implications of evolution into an artistic format that can be interpreted by people who may never study evolution. — Greg Graffin

Years should not be devoted to the acquisition of dead languages or to the study of history which, for the most part, is a detailed account of things that never occurred. It is useless to fill the individual with dates of great battles, with the births and deaths of kings. They should be taught the philosophy of history, the growth of nations, of philosophies, theories, and, above all, of the sciences. — Robert Green Ingersoll

The methods used for this purpose have made the study of the history of revolutions a rather difficult enterprise. It appears, for example, that there was not a single anti-government action under the reign of Louis Napoleon which had not been inspired by the police itself. — Hannah Arendt

One of the things I know from the study of history is that history surprises you. History is not written. It's not inevitable.The victory of evil is not certain. — Salman Rushdie

A study of the history of wages back through the years indicates clearly that when the cost-of-living rises appreciably wages have shortly been adjusted upward also. — Charles E. Wilson

History is the study of the world's crime — Voltaire

Indeed, my conclusion from a lifetime of psychohistorical study of childhood and society is that the history of humanity is founded upon the abuse of children. Just as family therapists today find that child abuse often functions to hold families together as a way of solving their emotional problems, so, too, the routine assault of children has been society's most effective way of maintaining its collective emotional homeostasis. — Lloyd DeMause

Natural history is not equivalent to biology. Biology is the study of life. Natural history is the study of animals and plants-of organisms. Biology thus includes natural history, and much else besides. — Marston Bates

Can one understand politics without understanding history, especially the history of political thought, and will this distinguish political philosophy from some other kinds of philosophy (such as, perhaps, logic) to which the study of history is not integral? — Raymond Geuss

It may be enough to study history in all its nuance and ambiguity for its own sake. But there is no country free of the need to find new ways of reading the past as an inspiring way of thinking about everything else, including the present. — Colm Toibin

In the decade of the 1980s, a massive and comprehensive study of religion in American life was undertaken by the Gallup organization. The results of the study were as terrifying as they were revealing. Americans, even evangelical Americans, are woefully ignorant of the content of Scripture and even more ignorant of the history of Christianity and classical Christian theology. — R.C. Sproul

Furthermore, the study of the present surroundings is insufficient: the history of the people, the influence of the regions through which it has passed on its migrations, and the people with whom it came into contact, must be considered. — Franz Boas

We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating new realities ... we're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. — Ron Suskind

The study of history is useful to the historian by teaching him his ignorance of women. — Henry Adams

The artificial intelligence approach may not be altogether the right one to make to the problem of designing automatic assembly devices. Animals and machines are constructed from entirely different materials and on quite different principles. When engineers have tried to draw inspiration from a study of the way animals work they have usually been misled; the history of early attempts to construct flying machines with flapping wings illustrates this very clearly. — Maurice Wilkes

Actor training should be broadly humanistic, involving the study not just of dramatic literature and theatre history, but of languages, literature, and history generally, and should be centered on acting in plays rather than just exercises, improvisations, monologues, or even scenes. — Richard Hornby

It didn't help that I was never allowed to study anything remotely contemporary until the last year of university: there was never any sense of that leading to this. If anything, my education gave me the opposite impression, of an end to cultural history round about the time that Forster wrote A Passage to India. The quickest way to kill all love for the classics, I can see now, is to tell young people that nothing else maters, because then all they can do is look at them in a museum of literature, through glass cases. Don't touch! And don't think for a moment that they want to live in the same world as you! And so a lot of adult life
if your hunger and curiosity haven't been squelched by your education
is learning to join up the dots that you didn't even know were there. — Nick Hornby

In conclusion we may say, in view of the confirmation that our study has given of the parallelism between individual and racial thought of the Self, that in the history of psychology we discern the great profile which the race has drawn on the pages of time. — James Mark Baldwin

The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. — Paul Johnson

The study of history is the best medicine for a sick mind; for in history you have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record you can find yourself and your country both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid. — Livy

I would say that the study of history is that which gives man the greatest optimism, for if man were not destined by his Maker to go on until the Kingdom of Heaven is attained, man would have been extinguished long ago by reason of all man's mistakes and frailties. — Douglas Southall Freeman

While being in the right seat at the right game might create short-term reassurance, I can't get over the idea that really what people feel is that their club is being run by a group of guys who know the history, study the heritage and view Villa as a proud Victorian club in its third century. — Randy Lerner

What struck me as I began to study history was how nationalist fervor
inculcated from childhood on by pledges of allegiance, national anthems, flags waving and rhetoric blowing
permeated the educational systems of all countries, including our own. I wonder now how the foreign policies of the United States would look if we wiped out the national boundaries of the world, at least in our minds, and thought of all children everywhere as our own. Then we could never drop an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, or napalm on Vietnam, or wage war anywhere, because wars, especially in our time, are always wars against children, indeed our children. — Howard Zinn

Killing one person was murder; killing a few or dozens was ore murder; so killing thousands or tens of thousands ought to be punished by putting the murderer to death a thousand times. What about more than that? a few hundred thousand? The death penalty, right? Yet, those of you who know some history are starting to hesitate.

What if he killed millions? I can guarantee you such a person would not be considered a murderer. Indeed, such a person may not even be thought to have broken any law. If you don't believe me, just study history! Anyone who has killed millions is deemed a 'great' man, a hero.

And if that person destroyed a whole world and killed every life on it--he would be hailed as a savior! — Liu Cixin

I felt that it was not a historical work, but that, under the guise of physical warfare, it described the duel that perpetually went on in the hearts of mankind, and that physical warfare was brought in merely to make the description of the internal duel more alluring. This preliminary intuition became more confirmed on a closer study of religion and the Gita. A study of the Mahabharata gave it added confirmation. I do not regard the Mahabharata as a historical work in the accepted sense. The Adiparva contains powerful evidence in support of my opinion. By ascribing to the chief actors superhuman or subhuman origins, the great Vyasa made short work the history of kings and their peoples. The persons therein described may be historical, but the author of the Mahabharata has used them merely to drive home his religious theme. — Mahatma Gandhi

I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another. — Joan Sutherland

I may add that the result of my 45 years of study of the Bible has led me all the time to a firmer faith that in the Old Testament, we have a true historical account of the history of the Israelite people. — Robert Dick Wilson

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

I enjoy practicing law too much to even contemplate retiring, but I often think about engaging in serious study of the history of art, of the intricacies of classical music. I could write a fugue, or perhaps learn to play the cello. — Karen DeCrow

Besides numerous science courses, I had the opportunity to study philosophy, the history of architecture, economics, and Russian history in courses taught by extraordinarily knowledgeable professors. — Stanley B. Prusiner

The study of history empowers nations and individuals with an ability to avoid errors of the past and lay foundations for victories in the future. — Aberjhani

I think it was my study of history that convinced me that the Democratic Party was more on the side of the average American. — George McGovern

Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered. — Fritz Stern

Most of the Bible is a history told by people living in lands occupied by conquering superpowers. It is a book written from the underside of power. It's an oppression narrative. The majority of the Bible was written by a minority people living under the rule and reign of massive, mighty empires, from the Egyptian Empire to the Babylonian Empire to the Persian Empire to the Assyrian Empire to the Roman Empire.
This can make the Bible a very difficult book to understand if you are reading it as a citizen of the the most powerful empire the world has ever seen. Without careful study and reflection, and humility, it may even be possible to miss central themes of the Scriptures. — Rob Bell

If the Gospel of Judas found in Codex Tchacos can be convincingly identified as being a Coptic translation of the original Greek Gospel of Judas that Bishop Ireneaus mentioned around A.D. 180 in his book, "Against Heresies," it will be an important step in the study of ancient gnosticism. We would have for the first time the chance to trace back the history of Sethian gnosticism to before the time of Irenaeus. This would be a significant gain in our knowledge of early Christianity. — Gregor Wurst

History says that progress often requires sacrifice, but what kind of progress can we claim when it is built on the lives of the citizens it is supposed to aid? — Joelle Charbonneau Independent Study

My point is, or should be, simple: history happened. The object is not to undo it, distort it, or to make it fit our present political attitudes. The object of history, which each generation properly interprets anew, is to understand what happened and why. A multicultural Canada can and should look at its past with fresh eyes. It should, for example, study how the Ukrainians came to Canada, how they were treated, how they lived, sometimes suffered, ultimately prospered, and became Canadians. What historians should not do is to recreate history to make it serve present purposes. They should not obscure or reshape events to make them fit political agendas. They should not declare whole areas of the past off-limits because they can only be presented in politically unfashionable terms any more than they should fail to draw object lessons from a past that was frequently less than pleasant and less than honourable. Because the past was not perfect, it must not be made perfect today. — J.L. Granatstein

love: a chemical history.
...The second stage, attraction, is governed by dopamine and serotonin. When, for example, couples report feeling indescribably happy in each other's presence, that's dopamine, the pleasure hormone, doing its work.
Taking cocaine fosters the same level of euphoria. In fact, scientists who study both the brains of new lovers and cocaine addicts are hard-pressed to tell the difference. — Nicola Yoon

Beyond natural history Other biological sciences take up the study at other levels of organization: dissecting the individual into organs and tissues and seeing how these work together, as in physiology; reaching down still further to the level of cells, as in cytology; and reaching the final biological level with the study of living molecules and their interactions, as in biochemistry. No one of these levels can be considered as more important than any other. — Marston Bates

The world of organisms, of animals and plants, is built up of individuals. I like to think, then, of natural history as the study of life at the level of the individual-of what plants and animals do, how they react to each other and their environment, how they are organized into larger groupings like populations and communities. — Marston Bates

The study of history reveals that human progress has not been continuous and regular, but intermittent and spasmodic, often depending upon apparently accidental causes. It is difficult to get a cross-section view of society at any given stage. — Charles A. Beard

Someday, if we won, if humanity survived, we'd be in the history books. Me and Jake and Rachel and Cassie and Tobias and Ax. They'd be household names, like generals from World War II or the Civil War. Patton and Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. Kids would study us in school. Bored, probably.
And then the teacher would tell the story of Marco. I'd be a part of history. What I was about to do. Some kid would laugh. Some kid would say, "Cold, man. That was really cold."
I had to do it, kid. It was a war. It's the whole point, you stupid, smug, smirking little jerk! Don't you get it?
It was the whole point. We hurt the innocent in order to stop the evil. Innocent Hork-Bajir. Innocent Taxxons. Innocent human-Controllers. How else to stop the Yeerks? How else to win?
No choice, you punk. We did what we had to do.
"Cold, man. The Marco dude? He was just cold. — Katherine Applegate

So study your rock history, son. That be the Bible of the Blues. — Steven Tyler

The study of the past with one eye upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history. It is the essence of what we mean by the word "unhistorical". — Herbert Butterfield

Many guilty consciences have been created by the slave trade. Europeans know that they carried on the slave trade, and Africans are aware that the trade would have been impossible if certain Africans did not cooperate with slave ships. To ease their guilty consciences, Europeans try to throw the major responsibility for the slave trade on to the Africans. One major author on the slave trade (appropriately titled Sins of Our Fathers) explained how many white people urged him to state that the trade was the responsibility of African chiefs, and that Europeans merely turned up to buy captives- as though without European demand there would have been captives sitting on the beach by the millions! Issues such as those are not the principal concern of this study, but they can be correctly approached only after understanding that Europe became the center of a world-wide system and that it was European capitalism which set slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in motion. Pg. 82 — Walter Rodney

In 1778, Jefferson presented to the Virginia legislature "A Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge," in which he argued that all forms of government could degenerate into tyranny. The best way of preventing this, he wrote, is "to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large." The study of history could serve as an especially effective bulwark, allowing the people to learn how to defeat tyranny from past examples. Jefferson would return again and again to the importance of education in a democracy. — Fareed Zakaria

Sometime during my study of the Dark Ages and Middle Ages, I uncovered an odd paradox that exists in our minds about time gone by. It is a difference most people don't discern between history and the past. Simply stated, the past is what is real and true, while history is merely what someone recorded. If you don't think there is a difference, experience an event in person and then read about it in the newspaper the next day, after witnesses have been interviewed. It might be shocking for many of us to realize that what we know as "history" can actually be a total fabrication, created from the imagination of someone with an ax to grind. Or perhaps, and it certainly happened in the Middle Ages, history was simply recorded by the man with the sharpest ax. — Andy Andrews

When you study history, you're really studying yourself. Every bit of history I've uncovered about my own family has some remnant in myself. — John Sedgwick

One dictionary that I consulted remarks that "natural history" now commonly means the study of animals and plants "in a popular and superficial way," meaning popular and superficial to be equally damning adjectives. This is related to the current tendency in the biological sciences to label every subdivision of science with a name derived from the Greek. "Ecology" is erudite and profound; while "natural history" is popular and superficial. Though, as far as I can see, both labels apply to just about the same package of goods. — Marston Bates

I will not go so far as to say that to construct a history of thought without profound study of the mathematical ideas of successive epochs is like omitting Hamlet from the play which is named after him. That would be claiming too much. But it is certainly analogous to cutting out the part of Ophelia. This simile is singularly exact. For Ophelia is quite essential to the play, she is very charming ... and a little mad. — Alfred North Whitehead

I ... believe the study of human history remains important and should not be banned. We should ensure that any archaeological studies are conducted with sensitivity and respect. Reburying relics, in my view, does not help anyone go anywhere. — Richard Leakey

For the first time in the history of photography, we can study the real-time production of snapshot making - globally! (On Flickr and other photosharing websites) — Joachim Schmid

But the closer we study their lives, and the better we know their deeds, the more profound is our admiration and the greater our reverence for the Pilgrim fathers. Between the drafting of their immortal charter of liberty in the cabin of the Mayflower and the fruition of their principles in the power and majesty of the republic of the United States of to-day is but a span in the records of the word, and yet it is the most important and beneficent chapter in history. To be able to claim descent from them, either by birth or adoption, is to glory in kinship with God's nobility. — Chauncey Depew

The history of religions, of which Christianity is a transcendent element, awaits the deepest study. It requires Bibles to free from Bibles. Comparative theology is the best of studies for liberating one's mind from geographical and traditional limitations. Like travelling, it shows the globe in its varying climates and zones, its latitude and longitude of intelligence. When the races shall have learned each other's language, the significance of things to thoughts, one faith becomes universal, one brotherhood. — Amos Bronson Alcott

The interactions of business and culture, one upon the other, form one of the least explored phases of history. For such a study, no city would appear better fixed than Florence, so richly dowered with both economic and spiritual vitality. — Mary Ritter Beard

Politics is a story about the relationship between the past and the future; history is a story about the relationship between the past and the present. It's what history and politics share - a vantage on the past - that makes writing the history of politics fraught. And it's what they don't share that makes the study of history vital. Politics is accountable to opinion; history is accountable to evidence. — Jill Lepore

In the static mode an observer may unify the pieces of a puzzle, but only as a blueprint - kinetics add the third dimention of depth, and the fourth of history. The motion, however, must be on the human scale, which happens also to be that of birds, waves, and clouds. Were a bullet to be made sentient, it still would see or hear or smell or feel nothing in land or water or air except its target. So, too, with a passenger in any machine that goes faster than a Model A. As speed increases, reality thins and becomes at the pace of a jet airplane no more substantial than a computer readout.
Running suits a person who seeks to look inward, through a fugue of pain, to study the dark self. A person afraid of the dark had better walk - strenuous enough for the rhythm of the feet to pace those of heart and lungs, relaxed enough to let him look outward, through joy, to a bright creation. — Harvey Manning

The anthropologist respects history, but he does not accord it a special value. He conceives it as a study complementary to his own: one of them unfurls the range of human societies in time, the other in space. — Claude Levi-Strauss

If you study the history of mankind, it seems to be a history of violence. Certainly the history of art, whether you look at paintings or movies or plays or whatever, is just a litany of murder and death. — Ethan Hawke

Education is something which should be apart from the necessities of earning a living, not a tool therefor. It needs contemplation, fallow periods, the measured and guided study of the history of man's reiteration of the most agonizing question of all: Why? — John D. MacDonald

If you study a historical episode and feel good about it, it probably means that you haven't had it explained very well. Historical conflict is usually the struggle of different conceptions of what is good. — Patrick N. Allitt

Social scientific research is and always will be tentative and imperfect. It does not claim to transform economics, sociology, and history into exact sciences. But by patiently searching for facts and patterns and calmly analyzing the economic, social, and political mechanisms that might explain them, it can inform democratic debate and focus attention on the right questions. It can help to redefine the terms of debate, unmask certain preconceived or fraudulent notions, and subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny. In my view, this is the role that intellectuals, including social scientists, should play, as citizens like any other but with the good fortune to have more time than others to devote themselves to study (and even to be paid for it - a signal privilege). — Thomas Piketty

Omit a few of the most abstruse sciences, and mankind's study of man occupies nearly the whole field of literature. The burden of history is what man has been; of law, what he does; of physiology, what he is; of ethics, what he ought to be; of revelation, what he shall be. — George Finlayson

Happy nations have no history. History is the study of mankind's misfortune. — Raymond Queneau

Nothing in this world, is completely new. That's why we study history and compare today, with the past. In the end, every human being, has the same way of thinking. — Da Xia