Tariq Ali Quotes

I love history. It was the only thing I did well at in school. I'm not ashamed to admit that I was not a good student but I was great at history.

I had no interest in history classes. In fact, I used to sleep in history classes, I used to bunk classes. But that is how students are supposed to be, no? I developed an interest in history much later. I have made a few films based on historical facts.

I do enjoy history. That's one of the things that I love about acting is you get a chance to really dive into history and develop a real personal opinion about it.

I love to read history; at its best, it is an art.

History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.

History, like a badly constructed concert hall, has occasional dead spots where the music can't be heard.

I have been always fascinated and seduced by history, which I think is very close, very close to literature.

I've always loved history and history is collage, it is a juxtaposition of the good and the bad and the strange, and how you place those sentences together changes the whole mood of a history.

History is a big word... History is not the sort of animal you can domesticate.

I was a terrible history student. They taught me history as if it were a visit to a wax museum or to the land of the dead. I was over twenty before I discovered that the past was neither quiet nor mute.

History is truely the witness of times past, the light of truth, the life of memory, the teacher of life, the messenger of antiquity.

When I was a kid, I thought history was the most boring subject of all. I shouldn't blame my teachers; I should blame me, but I'll blame them.

I've always been a relatively big history buff. In college, I took a lot of history courses, and when I was in grad school, I liked to audit them.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

I believe that historians and analysts of historical events need the authority of facts supplied by living witnesses to the events, which they make their subject.

The dignity of history consists in reciting events with truth and accuracy, and in presenting human agents and their actions in an interesting and instructive form. The first element in history, therefore, is truthfulness; and this truthfulness must be displayed in a concrete form.

I write to learn the flow of history.

I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history is not that interesting sometimes, and it can feel a bit medicinal.

I used my history degree about twice a year whether I needed to or not.

I've always read a lot of historical books and I'm a big fan of documentaries, and I've always thought of ways to do it.

History is, in its essence, exciting; to present it as dull is, to my mind, stark and unforgivable misrepresentation.

History. The more of it you have the more you have to live it. After a little while there gets to be too much of it to memorize and maybe that's when empires start to decline.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

History can tell us what happened in the past. But it cannot assert that it must happen again in the future.

There's a good reason why nobody studies history, it just teaches you too much.