Cate Blanchett Quotes

All those [events in history] were such dramas as we see now, only with different actors.

Stand firm in the Lord. Stand firm and let Him fight your battle. Do not try to fight alone.

The battle cry sort of gave you away. Try not to yell next time.

Optimists, by contrast, look for specific, limited, short-term explanations for bad events, and as a result, in the face of a setback, they’re more likely to pick themselves up and try again.

Songs are often written by people who are witnesses to history.

How something important happens is the business of historians and newspapers, the effect it has is the business of philosophers and writers and especially poets.

In the novel, I can change things and simplify, and make events work towards whatever meanings I'm trying to get at more efficiently.

And yet the world we live in-its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence-is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget. Leopold's Congo is but one of those silences of history.

[The] events by which the fate of nations is not materially changed, leave a faint impression on the page of history, and the patience of the reader would be exhausted by the repetition of the same hostilities [between Rome and Persia], undertaken without cause, prosecuted without glory, and terminated without effect.

Such events may be disbelieved or disregarded; but the charity of a bishop, Acacius of Amida, whose name might have dignified the saintly calendar, shall not be lost in oblivion.

History gets thicker as it approaches recent times: more people, more events, and more books written about them. More evidence is preserved, often, one is tempted to say, too much. Decay and destruction have hardly begun their beneficent work.

Go back to the breathing and try to be in that moment deeply. Because there is a possibility to handle every kind of event and the essential is to keep the peace in yourself.

There are a whole other range of sciences that must deal with the narrative reconstruction of the inordinately complex events of history that can occur but once in their detailed glory. And for those kinds of sciences, be it cosmology, or evolutionary biology, or geology, or palaeontology, the experimental methods, simplification, quantification, prediction and repetition of the experimental sciences don't always work. You have to go with the narrative, the descriptive methods of what? Of historians.

Don't underestimate the power of events that happened a long time ago. That is the tragic flaw of modern man.

It was interesting looking back at the '80s and trying to find newspaper headlines from the time - the cliché of history repeating itself.

Painting a picture is like trying to fight a battle.

I adored history, not the dry dates and boring battles, but the stories and the people who populated them.

I definitely am looking to do some more dramatic roles; I'd love to do a period piece. I'm just getting started; I feel like there's a whole wealth of options out there to try my hand at.

History was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren't looking -- an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

A great deal of my battle, as an actor, is to widdle away the things that make me self-conscious and try to trick myself into not being self-conscious.

There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.

You're trying to dramatize events to tell a story most effectively. That doesn't mean the events aren't true, it just means you're making them as dramatic as you possibly can.

It seems to me that the basic plot of all historical novels is a romance swept aside by history.

We are no longer dealing with historical events, but with places of collapse.

History, contrary to popular theories, is kings and dates and battles.