Ahad Ha'am Quotes

All societies are historical.

You have to look at history as an evolution of society.

If the ideas of any particular man are determined by his environment, then the ideas of humanity, in their historical development, are determined by the development of the social environment, by the history of social relationships.

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

You must read history forward and not backward.

History is the record of human society or world civilization, of the changes that take place in the nature of that society … of all the transformations that society undergoes by its very nature.

Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and is gifted with an eye and a soul.

Mills insisted that a sociologist's proper subject was the intersection of biography and history.

We have need of history in its entirety, not to fall back into it, but to see if we can escape from it.

So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.

We are not makers of history. We are made by history.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

To study history means submitting to chaos and nevertheless retaining faith in order and meaning.

My students often ask me, 'What is sociology?' And I tell them, 'It's the study of the way in which human beings are shaped by things that they don't see.'

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.

I think you can learn from history.

Customary though it may be to write about that institutionalized pastime as though it existed apart from the general environment, my story does not lend itself to such treatment.

I got history solidly under my belt, reading Russian history and biographies. I couldn't change the facts. I could only play with how the people might have responded to the facts of their lives.

I think in this, definitely, because you are feeling how it felt to live in a completely different time. The mannerisms and the way that people behaved was quite different.

It is the recognition of history as a record of human experience which has inevitably resulted in the inclusion of this conquest of civilization within the framework of a complete human history.

I don't think you should ever run from history. You should learn from it and embrace it.

Introspection and preserved writings give us far more insight into the ways of past humans than we have into the ways of past dinosaurs. For that reason, I'm optimistic that we can eventually arrive at convincing explanations for these broadest patterns of human history.

Genes cannot tell us how to catalogue or comprehend human diversity. Environments can, cultures can, geographies can, histories can.

Science of Society