Top 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

What are other terms used to describe the Islamic goal of world domination? Other terms used to describe the Islamic goal of world domination are biological jihad or demographic jihad, which describe the nonviolent strategy of Muslims moving into Europe and the West and having more babies than their hosts. Within several generations they hope to repopulate traditionally Christian cultures with their own people, and they are certainly on track to reach that goal. According to a Vatican report issued recently, the Roman Catholic Church understands this: "For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us."20 — David Jeremiah

There's a history of English literature where the best boils to the top, and Jane Austen stands right at the top of that. — JJ Feild

nerves


twitching in the sheets --
to face the sunlight again,
that's clearly
trouble.
I like the city better when the
neon lights are going and
the nudies dance on top of the
bar
to the mauling music.

I'm under this sheet
thinking.
me nerves are hampered by
history --
the most memorable concern of mankind
is the guys it takes to
face the sunlight again.

love begins at the meeting of two
strangers. love for the world is
impossible. I'd rather stay in bed
and sleep.

dizzied by the days and the streets and the years
I pull the sheets to my neck.
I turn my ass to the wall.
I hate the mornings more than
any man. — Charles Bukowski

But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air. — Donna Tartt

Pops gave him a cool stare that settled Tom down - a thing not always easy to do. "Son, do you know what history is?"
"Uh ... stuff that happened in the past?"
"Nope," he said, trying on his canvas change-belt. "History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever growing pile of crap. Right now, we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. That's why your folks' clothes look so funny in old photographs, to name but a single example. And, as someone who's destined to buried beneath the shit of your children and grandchildren, I think you should be just a leetle more forgiving. — Stephen King

Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible. — Eric Metaxas

In science, the whole system builds on people looking at other people's results and building on top of them. In witchcraft, somebody had a small secret and guarded it - but never allowed others to really understand it and build on it. Traditional software is like witchcraft. In history, witchcraft just died out. The same will happen in software. When problems get serious enough, you can't have one person or one company guarding their secrets. You have to have everybody share in the knowledge. — Linus Torvalds

Be as a tower firmly set; Shakes not its top for any blast that blows. — Dante Alighieri

Don't give me any shit about that, Lucas - not with your history," Henderson said, irritated. "No matter what happens with me, I'll get her an impressive-sounding staff job in Washington, something involving Virginia agriculture and natural resources," Henderson said. "I'll buy her some top-end TV training, some good threads, lean on my friends for donations. A hot, female, law-and-order Democrat who carries a gun and has major experience in D.C.? Are you kiddin' me? That Tea Party asshole won't know what hit him. He'll be like Toto in the fuckin' tornado. — John Sandford

It is a fact of life that oversimplified accounts of the development of science are often necessary in its teaching. Most scientific progress is a messy, complex and slow process; only with the hindsight of an overall understanding of a phenomenon can a story be told pedagogically rather than chronologically. This necessitates the distilling of certain events and personalities from the melee: those who are deemed to have made the most important contributions. It is inevitable therefore that the many smaller or less important advances scattered randomly across hundreds of years of scientific history tend to be swept up like autumn leaves into neat piles, on top of which sit larger-than-life personalities credited with taking a discipline forward in a single jump. Sometimes this is perfectly valid, and one cannot deny the genius of an Aristotle, a Newton, a Darwin or an Einstein. But it often leaves behind forgotten geniuses and unsung heroes. — Jim Al-Khalili

We as women have so much cultural training (on top of whatever familial nurturing history we have) that pushes us to give nurture to everyone but our selves and to look for nurture from anyone but our selves. Practicing and developing our capacity to nurture our selves whenever we need nurturing is vital to our process of becoming more whole. Nurture from others can add on to and amplify what we do for our selves. But to take the very best care of our selves, self-nurturing is the essential baseline from which we must start. As — Robyn L. Posin

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns.
If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself.
What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.
There is no free will.
There are no variables. — Chuck Palahniuk

As history of any kind will tell us, when human beings get an opportunity to express their individual selves, a few selves will go completely over the top. — Doug Glanville

One large cat bounded up the side of the outcrop to stand in full view on an overhanging boulder. She stared down at them, inside their protective enclosure, tilting her head from side to side. Her scarred yellow-brown coat was immaculately groomed, but the long tufting hair of her snout was matted with the bright red smear of uncongealed blood from a recent kill. Her upper lip curved over the top of foot-long saber teeth. — P.J. Parker

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. — Kurt Vonnegut

The top 1% holds nearly half of the financial wealth, the greatest concentration of wealth of any industrialized nation, more concentrated than at any time since the Depression. In 1980, on average, CEOs earned 42 times the salary of the average worker, and these days they earn about 476 times that salary. Since 1980, the rich have been getting richer fast and furiously and hard-working people in the middle are sliding down the greasy slope who never imagined this could happen to them. The concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few is the death knell of democracy. No republic in the history of humankind has survived this. — Garrison Keillor

One thing that in my reporting that I found and was amazed to find was that, as far as I could determine, neither high-level White House officials in the Bush administration nor even the top brass at the CIA even knew the history of water boarding when they approved it. — Scott Shane

In the history of modern warfare, it is doubtful if there are any generals at the top of a command pyramid who have displayed such collective incompetence as these two officers. — Shiv Kunal Verma

Everything passes through the eyes of top bureaucrats who closely watch to ensure that no intruder can enter their ranks and disrupt the order and arrangement of values in which everything is predetermined and where everyone knows their place, everyone's potential, talent and position in history. — Dejan Stojanovic

He broke me down past the flesh, past the muscle, past the bone, down to my soul and in a loud provocation, he asked, "What are you made of?"
After I gathered the broken bits and pieces of my life together, I shouted at the top of my lungs, "HOPE! Unbreakable, undeniable, irrevocable hope! — Jay Grewal

Rabbi Heskel Shpilman is a deformed mountain, a giant ruined desert, a cartoon house with the windows shut and the sink left running. A little kid lumped him together, a mob of kids, blind orphans who never laid eyes on a man. They clumped the dough of his arms and legs to the dough of his body, then jammed his head down on top. A millionaire could cover a Rolls-Royce with the fine black silk-and-velvet expanse of the rebbe's frock coat and trousers. It would require the brain strength of the eighteen greatest sages in history to reason through the arguments against and in favor of classifying the rebbe's massive bottom as either a creature of the deep, a man-made structure, or an unavoidable act of God. — Michael Chabon

The function of traditional history is to create a citizenry that looks to the top - the president, Congress, the Supreme Court - to make the important decisions. That's what traditional history is all about: the laws that were passed, the decisions made by the court. So much of history is built around "the great men." All of that is very anti-democratic. — Howard Zinn

As the most powerful people in history, we have climbed to the top of the world food chain, so to speak. Facing not one single enemy or predator who poses to us any danger of consequence, we've found the only prey left: ourselves. — Gavin De Becker

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that. — Diane Wakoski

Of all the ills of man which can be successfully processed by Scientology, arthritis ranks near the top. In skilled hands, this ailment, though misunderstood and dreaded in the past, already has begun to become history. Twenty-five hours of Scientology by an auditor who fairly understands how to process arthritis can be said to produce an invariable alleviation of the condition. Some cases, even severe ones, have responded in as little as two hours of processing, according to reports from auditors in the field. — L. Ron Hubbard

To me, it was a sad fate to have been born into a period and a world where everything was in tip-top order, and the only real excitement was to be found in history books and occasionally also in the paper. — Hans Jonas

He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. "And I guarantee you, I've had it in every one of them before they ever got on the payroll." A pause. Silence above humming tires on the hot-top road. "What do you think of that?" "Surely some refuse," I suggested cautiously. "Not if they want to eat - or feed their kids," he snorted. "If they don't put out, they don't get the job. — John Howard Griffin

Griffin took one step toward the big desk and swiped his arms across the entire top. Pens, papers, books, a small marbel bust, and an ink well all crashed to the floor.
Griffin leaned across the desk, his arms braced on the now-clear top, and stared into Wakefield's outraged eyes. "We seem to be under a confusion of communication. I did not come here to ask for your sisters hand. I came to tell you I will marry Hero, with or without your permission Your Grace. She has lain with me more than once. She may very well be carrying my child. And if you think I'll give up her or our babe, you have not done nearly enough research into my character or history."
Griffin pushed himself off the desk before the other man could utter a word and storde out the door. — Elizabeth Hoyt

It was possibly the most circumspect advance in the history of military manoeuvres, right down at the bottom end of the scale that things like the Charge of the Light Brigade are at the top of. — Terry Pratchett

January 8, 1959; Castro enters Havana
On January 8, 1959, Fidel made his grand entrance into Havana. With his son Fidelito at his side, he rode on top of a Sherman tank to Camp Columbia, where he gave the first of his long, rambling, difficult-to-endure speeches. It was broadcast on radio and television for the entire world to witness. For the Cubans it was what they had waited for! During the speech, smiling Castro asked Camilo Cienfuegos, "How am I doing?" and the catch phrase "Voy bien, Camilo" was born. — Hank Bracker

Just a little off the top!"- A. Boleyn — Robert Lynn Asprin

From the top of Castro Street, it looks like a river of people. It looks, I realize, like a march - rows and rows of people, gathered to exert their power. Only this time we aren't marching. We don't need to show our numbers to show our worth. This time our power comes from staying in this space, from walking the hallowed ground of our history and bringing it to life. I am alone, yes. But I am a part of everything. I feel it - I've been living in a world, but what I have is a universe. — Nina LaCour

'The Others' books take place in an alternate Earth where the Earth natives have been the dominant predators throughout the world's history, and humans are nowhere near the top of the food chain. But humans are clever and resilient, if not always wise, and have made some bargains with the Others in order to survive. — Anne Bishop

Suppose a top politician, entertainment figure, or sports star said it didn't really matter who shot Lincoln or why, who attacked Pearl Harbor, the Alamo or the USS Liberty. Imagine the derision. Imagine the ridicule. Imagine the loss in credibility and marketing revenue. Now imagine if a well-respected academic 'who should know better' said exactly the same thing. It doesn't really matter who committed a great crime; history had nothing to teach us; we should never waste precious time trying to apprehend the perpetrators, nor understand their motives but focus only on the outcome of their foul deeds.

Well, that is exactly what Noam Chomsky appears to believe. Do not focus on the plot or the plotters or the clever planning of any crime but only the aftermath. Strangely, I had always thought linguistics was the scientific study of language rather than a lame attempt at disinformation. — Douglas Herman

There are pictures of Kim and Mia from high school and one of the two of them posing on top of the Empire State Building - a jolting reminder that their relationship wasn't truncated, they have a history of which I know nothing. — Gayle Forman

The Iran nuclear issue is on top of the agenda. It is a very complicated issue with long history. — Yukiya Amano

It was an injured worker finding a lawyer on a contingent fee in a little town in Texas that blew the top off one of the greatest industrial disasters in American history. — Ralph Nader

History is so full of high-level intelligence officials who actually worked for the other side that one is forced to conclude that whether or not top intelligence jobs attract the disloyal, they surely offer incentives to disloyalty. — Angelo Codevilla

Here are the top three global resources getting scarcer in the twenty-first century: ozone layer, rain forest, people eager to read the fiction of others. That's right, folks. For the first time in I believe written history, there are far more fiction writers on earth than fiction readers. — Sandra Tsing Loh

Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world. — Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel

We've never had our injustices rectified from the top, from the president or Congress, or the Supreme Court, no matter what we learned in junior high school about how we have three branches of government, and we have checks and balances, and what a lovely system. No. The changes, important changes that we've had in history, have not come from those three branches of government. They have reacted to social movements. — Howard Zinn

Drugs have a long history of use in magic in various cultures, and usually in the context of either ecstatic communal rituals or in personal vision quests. However compared to people in simple pastoral tribal situations most people in developed countries now live in a perpetual state of mental hyperactivity with overactive imaginations anyway, so throwing drugs in on top of this usually just leads to confusion and a further loss of focus.
Plus as the real Shamans say, if you really do succeed in opening a door with a drug it will thereafter open at will and most such substances give all they will ever give on the first attempt. — Peter J. Carroll

America is the world's top war-master; the most sophisticated killer-culture in history. — Bryant McGill

TO BE HOPEFUL in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don't have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. — Howard Zinn

Western Civilization was responsible for a paradigm shift in history. It created the industrial and scientific revolutions that enabled the birth of a transportation, communications and knowledge revolution unprecedented in the 5 billion year history of this planet. Unfortunately this revolution took place amidst a moral vacuum at the very top of the power structure. It is as if a three year old child had been given control over both a candy story and a shotgun. He was able to use the shotgun to get all the candy he wanted but he had no idea what to do next. Whenever somebody tried to tell him too much candy was bad for him, he shot the person who said that. — Benjamin Fulford

[In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story. — Rebecca Solnit

Regarding the Economy & Taxation: America's most successful achievers do pay a higher share of the total tax burden. The top one percent income earners paid 18 percent of the total tax burden in 1981, and paid 25 percent in 1991. The bottom 50 percent of income earners paid only 8 percent of the total tax burden, and paid only 5 percent in 1991. History shows that tax cuts have always resulted in improved economic growth producing more tax revenue in the treasury. — Rush Limbaugh

Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The — Nancy Isenberg

We are sitting on top of a vast cultural and historical pyramid of accumulated misconceptions, lies and myths, built one on top of the other. — Bryant McGill

Presidents Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon lent their support to such interventionist measures as Medicare and the Environmental Protection Agency. Eisenhower pushed for the greatest public works project in the history of the United States - the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act, which linked the nation together with four-lane (and occasionally six-lane) interstate highways covering forty thousand miles. The GOP also backed large expansion of federally supported higher education. And to many Republicans at the time, a marginal income tax rate of more than 70 percent on top incomes was not repugnant. — Robert B. Reich

Of all the inventions of humans, the computer is going to rank near or at the top as history unfolds and we look back. It is the most awesome tool that we have ever invented. I feel incredibly lucky to be at exactly the right place in Silicon Valley, at exactly the right time, historically, where this invention has taken form. — Steve Jobs

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn't seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late. — Joseph Stiglitz

Griffin leaned across the desk, his arms braced on the now-clear top, and stared into Wakefield's outraged eyes. We seem to be under a confusion of communication. I did not come here to ask for your sister's hand. I came to tell you I will marry Hero, with or without your permission, Your Grace. She has lain with me more than once. She may well be carrying my child. And if you think that I'll give up either her or our babe, you have not done nearly enough research into my character or history. — Elizabeth Hoyt

I wonder how difficult it would be to just make a list of all the top blood purists and kill them.
They'd tried exactly that during the French Revolution, more or less - make a list of all the enemies of Progress and remove everything above the neck - and it hadn't worked out well from what Harry recalled. Maybe he needed to dust off some of those history books his father had bought him, and see if what had gone wrong with the French Revolution was something easy to fix. — Eliezer Yudkowsky

If democracy were to be given any meaning, if it were to go beyond the limits of capitalism and nationalism, this would not come, if history were any guide, from the top. It would come through citizen's movements, educating, organizing, agitating, striking, boycotting, demonstrating, threatening those in power with disruption of the stability they needed. — Howard Zinn

Perhaps, all these years, the historiographers had been unwilling to recognize history as a spiral, perhaps because a spiral was so difficult to describe. Easier to photograph the spiral from the top, easier to flatten the spring into a coil. — Anthony Burgess

He'd figured out the body, so now it was on to the brain. Specifically: How do you make anyone actually want to do any of this stuff? How do you flip the internal switch that changes us all back into the Natural Born Runners we once were? Not just in history, but in our own lifetimes. Remember? Back when you were a kid and you had to be yelled at to slow down? Every game you played, you played at top speed, sprinting like crazy as you kicked cans, freed all, and attacked jungle outposts in your neighbors' backyards. Half the fun of doing anything was doing it at record pace, making it probably the last time in your life you'd ever be hassled for going too fast. — Christopher McDougall

The second covered the history of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, based on a top secret 2009 internal report from the NSA's inspector general; another detailed the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program that I had read about on the plane; — Glenn Greenwald

Kirkus Star Review stated of Behind the Lines: "An excellent history that should catapult Miller to the top tier of popular historians. — Jeffrey B. Miller

Alexander's top generals were about to tangle with one of history's toughest teenage girls. — James Romm

I find the name of Jesus Christ written on the top of every page of modern history. — George Bancroft

What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places
and there are so many
where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. — Howard Zinn

Instead of speaking about Real Madrid, Mr Wenger should speak about Arsenal and explain how he lost 2-0 against a team in the Champions League for the first time [Braga]. The history about the young kids is getting old now. Sagna, Clichy, Walcott, Fabregas, Song, Nasri, Van Persie, Arshavin are not kids. They are all top players. — Jose Mourinho

And what of the masses in this intellectual's paradise? They have found in the intellectual the most formidable taskmaster in history. No other regime has treated the masses so callously as raw material, to be experimented on and manipulated at will; and never before have so many lives been wasted so recklessly in war and in peace. On top of all this, the Communist intelligentsia has been using force in a wholly novel manner. The traditional master uses force to exact obedience and lets it go at that. Not so the intellectual. Because of his professed faith in the power of words and the irresistibility of the truths which supposedly shape his course, he cannot be satisfied with mere obedience. He tries to obtain by force a response that is usually obtained by the most perfect persuasion, and he uses Terror as a fearful instrument to extract faith and fervor from crushed souls. — Eric Hoffer

The Reagan years "produced one of the most dramatic redistributions of income in the nation's history ... The income of families in the bottom decile fell by 10.4 percent ... while the income of those in the top one percent rose by 87.1 percent."
Chain Reaction, 23 — Thomas B. Edsall

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

I was deeply disturbed by the meeting. If I couldn't do what I thought was necessary to take care of the troops, I didn't see how I could remain as secretary. I was in a quandary. I shared Obama's concerns about an open-ended conflict, and while I wanted to fulfill the troop requests of the commanders, I knew they always would want more - just like all their predecessors throughout history. How did you scale the size of the commitment to the goal? How did you measure risk? But I was deeply uneasy with the Obama White House's lack of appreciation - from the top down - of the uncertainties and inherent unpredictability of war. "They all seem to think it's a science," I wrote in a note to myself. I came closer to resigning that day than at any other time in my tenure, though no one knew it. During — Robert M. Gates

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

That is the key to history. Terrific energy is expended - civilizations are built up - excellent institutions devised; but each time something goes wrong. Some fatal flaw always brings the selfish and the cruel people to the top and it all slides back into misery and ruin. — C.S. Lewis

Oh my lord. It can't be. But it most certainly was. What in the heck is he doing here? Why in the hell was the star wide receiver of the Georgia Bulldogs at his mother's funeral? The man that made history by coming out and telling the world he was bisexual two years ago. He was a hero, and he looked the part. He stood tall, at least 6'2", or 6'3". His wavy, dirty blond hair was longer on top than the cropped hair on the sides. Dark shades covered what he knew were magnetic, emerald-green eyes. His broad shoulders made his suit hang beautifully on his large body. Curtis' mouth watered at the thought of all those muscles. He'd gotten glimpses of the man's chest and biceps when the reporters and cameramen of ESPN would go in the locker room to listen to the coach congratulate his team on a win. There he was right there, just twenty feet away from him. — A.E. Via

Whereas Taft discouraged the young Yale student from extracurricular reading, fearful it would detract from required courses, Roosevelt read widely yet managed to stand near the top of his class. The breath of his numerous interests allowed him to draw on knowledge across various disciplines, from zoology in philosophy and religion, from poetry and drama to history and politics. — Doris Kearns Goodwin

People say history is boring, and that is true because people are boring. We haven't changed since time began. We're still the same. We've obviously made some changes. When we started, it was all about food, clothing and shelter. Now we watch 'Top Chef', 'Project Runway', and 'Extreme Makeover: Home Edition.' — Colin Hay

Blaise decided that the thing he would remember most about this London was the sour stink of it. The overripe foulness of the streets made him gag, and when a woman emptied a chamber pot from a top window, nearly catching him in its spray, he bent over and wretched, much to the Nightsneaks' amusement. — Teresa Flavin

History is the collective and ancestral shit of the human race, a great big and ever-growin pile of crap. Right now we're standin at the top of it, but pretty soon we'll be buried under the doodoo of generations yet to come. — Stephen King

They read a little bit, write a little, and especially agree with themselves on important moves, important information, important awards, important writers that they plan to enthrone forever in history through a variety of memberships and numerous prizes awarded under the influence of top bureaucrats who know everything, not only about literature, but also about secret conspiracies, the Masons that lurk in every corner to crucify someone, steal someone's soul and sell it to an unknown devil, about whom only the chief bureaucrat possesses secret knowledge that he doesn't share; about history, ghosts, missing continents; about who said what to whom in confidence. — Dejan Stojanovic

Everyone has got their own ideas and they push them and say to hell with everyone else. That's the history of the human race. It got us on top, only now it is pushing us off. The thing is that people will put up with any kind of discomfort, and dying babies, and old age at thirty as long as it has always been that way. Try to get them to change and they fight you, even while they're dying, saying it was good enough for grandpa so it's good enough for me. Bango, dead. — Harry Harrison

I am a taxonomist, I work in the descriptive, narrative sciences of natural history. Unfortunately there is this status ordering from physics, the queen of the sciences up on top, down through a bunch of squishy subjects, ending up with sociology and psychology on the bottom. Palaeontologists are not much above that in their conventional ordering. — Richard Lewontin

I saw a huge steam roller,
It blotted out the sun.
The people all lay down, lay down;
They did not try to run.
My love and I, we looked amazed
Upon the gory mystery.
"Lie down, lie down!" the people cried.
"The great machine is history!"
My love and I, we ran away,
The engine did not find us.
We ran up to a mountain top,
Left history far behind us.
Perhaps we should have stayed and died,
But somehow we don't think so.
We went to see where history'd been,
And my, the dead did stink so. — Kurt Vonnegut

the U.S. government has a long history of overclassifying information that shouldn't be classified at all - and keeping information classified until long after any justification for classifying it has disappeared. — Rosa Brooks

It's been a strange day - a day when I thought I was on top of the world, planning my life. I planned all of my courses for the rest of the semester at Smith, and talked to my advisor about honoring in History. — Julie Nixon Eisenhower

And if you need to read that sentence again, no shame. It's complicated - as complicated as the sovereignty of God. Yet as simple as if. Gustave Eiffel did not build his tower so Lora and I could kiss on top of it. Nevertheless, his if made it possible. And it's your ifs that open doors of opportunity for others, most of whom you won't meet on this side of eternity. But make no mistake about it, every little if makes an exponential difference across time and eternity. History — Mark Batterson

The man who did the shooting was a civilian, Peter Kakhovsky, a gifted intellectual of extreme purity of motive in whom the conviction of the necessity of regicide burned with a gem-like flame. Determined to kill, expecting to die, this brilliant and terrible apparition, his slender form bundled up in a sheepskin coat, his delicate features surmounted by a shabby top hat, shot to kill with that indiscriminate ruthlessness which was later to characterise a whole generation of revolutionary terrorists. If he could not yet murder the Tsar, he would do the next best thing. — Edward Crankshaw

What's more they are also some of the best-paid entertainers in history: Curtis Jackson, aka 50 Cent, raked in U.S. $150 million in 2008 alone, placing him on top of Forbes's "Hip-Hop Cash Kings" list. — Peter Mcallister

There's a thing at the Museum of Natural History in New York, where I live: they have a stairwell where you follow the beginning and the course of this planet, and it's a very long stairwell, and you follow, and you follow, and then you reach the top, and we're, like, half a step on the stairwell - the timeline for us on this planet. — Peter Dinklage

The Government honoring our treaties and sovereignty is first and foremost. These issues are still the top priority which [Barak] Obama, if elected, has promised us. For us, we should implement the most impor-tant programs right now: they are programs to teach the children a positive sense of dignity, self-worth, and the importance of sustaining their culture, history, language and honor as a people. — Leonard Peltier

There was a grumpy librarian in the library. I could tell that he was the librarian because he seemed to be made of books. I told him that we needed information, and he got us some butterfly nets and sent us up to the top floor of the library.

I wondered why we were carrying nets. Valentine didn't know.

The book I wanted was pretty obvious. It was called A History of Everything.

Finding it was easy. Catching it, however, was not. The moment I reached for it, the whole shelfful of books took off into the air, fluttering like pigeons, and suddenly I knew what the butterfly nets were for.

I waved the net about and eventually I caught A History of Everything. As soon as I'd got it, all the rest of the books flapped back to their shelf, all except one, a little red-covered book, which fluttered over my head happily. — Neil Gaiman

We've always used stories as a way to pass on our history, as a way to explain things in life that we don't understand. We use them to make us feel connected to everything around us, and to help us escape to another time or place.
Bookshops across the world are full of these stories.
From travelling booksellers and undercover bookshops, to pop-up stalls and community hubs, walking into a good bookshop is like walking into another zone.These places are time machines, spaceships, story-makers, secret-keepers. They are dragon-tamers, dream-catchers, fact-finders and safe places. They are full of infinite possibilities, and tales worth taking home.
Because whether we're in the middle of the desert or in the heart of a city, on the top of a mountain or on an underground train: having good stories to keep us company can mean the whole world. — Jen Campbell

When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten. — Erma Bombeck

The fact was, as a story - even leaving out the supernatural, especially leaving out the supernatural, taking it all as metaphor, I mean - the Bible made perfect sense to me from the very beginning. I saw a God whose nature was creative love. He made man in his own image for the purpose of forming new and free relationships with him. But in his freedom, man turned away from that relationship to consult his own wisdom and desires. The knowledge of good and evil was not some top-secret catalogue of nice and naughty acts that popped into Eve's mind when a talking snake got her to eat the magic fruit. The knowledge was built into the action of disobedience itself: it's what she learned when she overruled the moral law God had placed within her. There was no going back from that. The original sin poisoned all history. History's murders, rapes, wars, oppressions, and injustices are now the inescapable plot of the story we're in. The — Andrew Klavan

But what is happening in America today is, I think, unparalleled in history. We are rising to the top and falling to the bottom; we are becoming wealthier as individuals and baser as a society; we are more powerful than ever and less mindful; we share a level of prosperity that is so high that it is a new thing in history, unprecedented in the story of man, and yet this wonderful thing we share has not made us closer as a people. And this has implications. — Peggy Noonan

My history is my step to future , whatever the history was full of garbage, but I can get over it and get to the TOP with my History — Ahmed Farrag

Later bad things will be said about Stalin; he'll be called a tyrant and his reign of terror will be denounced. But for the people of Eduard's generation he will remain the supreme leader of the people of the Union at the most tragic moment in their history; the man who defeated the Nazis and proved himself capable of a sacrifice worthy of the ancient Romans: the Germans had captured his son, Lieutenant Yakov Dzhugashvili, while the Russians had captured Field Marshal Paulus, one of the top military leaders of the Reich, at Stalingrad. When the German High Command proposed an exchange, Stalin responded with disdain that he didn't exchange field marshals for simple lieutenants. Yakov committed suicide by throwing himself on the electrified barbed wire fence of his prison camp. * — Emmanuel Carrere

Boy, there are people who conquered half the world, slaughtered whole populations, wiped cultures off the face of the planet, and you know what history calls them? Heroes! Kings, presidents, champions, explorers. You think America was settled by white men because the Indians invited us her? No, we took this land because we were stronger, and that's how every page of human history is written. It's just our nature. We're a predator species, top of the food chain. Survival of the fittest is written in our blood, it's stenciled on every gene of our DNA. The strong take and the strong make, and the weak are there only to help them do it. End of story. — Jonathan Maberry

There was not one cause for our internment, but many - a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves ... like watching a tree grow. — Gretel Ehrlich

Both 'Mabo' and 'The Sapphires' have been significant roles because it's about my people. They are celebratory stories, on top of allowing people to understand our history. — Deborah Mailman

Looking back, I realize my favorite stories weren't in books, they were in comics. On top of being a history enthusiast, my father was also a comics fan, and he kept his stash in the top drawer of his dresser, in easy reach of a kid making a beeline to the bathroom. — Jeff Kinney

Moved by the need for control, for an unchallenged top tier, the power elite in American history has thrived by placating the vulnerable and creating for them a false sense of identification----denying real class differences whenever possible. The relative few who escape their lower class roots are held up as models, as though everyone at the bottom has the same chance of succeeding through cleverness and hard work, scrimping and saving. Personal connections, favoritism, and trading on class-based knowledge still grease the wheels that power social mobility in today's business and professional worlds. — Nancy Isenberg

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things ... Life is one crisis after another. — Richard M. Nixon

Do we really want to condemn as excessive the use of safety helmets, car seats, playgrounds designed so kids will be less likely to crack their skulls, childproof medicine bottles, and baby gates at the top of stairs? One writer criticizes "the inappropriateness of excessive concern in low-risk environments," but of course reasonable people disagree about what constitutes both "excessive" and "low risk." Even if, as this writer asserts, "a young person growing up in a Western middle-class family is safer today than at any time in modern history," the relevance of that relative definition of safety isn't clear. Just because fewer people die of disease today than in medieval times doesn't mean it's silly to be immunized. And perhaps young people are safer today because of the precautions that some critics ridicule. — Alfie Kohn