Historical Context Quotes

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes.

Chronological snobbery is the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively), or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life. Men adjust themselves to their land; they create their own laws of being; their notions of right and wrong.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

I am guiding you to seek truth from the facts of the historical conditions of our society and to identify the problems. The correct solutions will come with the correct identification of the problems.

... assertions that Christianity is a part of the common law. The proof of the contrary ... is incontrovertible; to wit, that the common law existed while the Anglo-Saxons were yet pagans, at a time when they had never heard the name of Christ pronounced, or knew that such a character existed.

There is no reason to equivocate or lie about it. The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 was held for no other reason than to eliminate the nigger from politics…let the world know it just as it is.

We should not lay all past mistakes on Chairman Mao. So we must be very objective in assessing him. His contributions were primary, his mistakes secondary. In China, we will inherit the many good things in Chairman Mao's thinking while at the same time explaining clearly the mistakes he made.

If you know the history of the whole concept of whiteness if you know the history of the whole concept of the white race, where it came from and for what reason you know that it was a trick, and it's worked brilliantly. You see, prior to the mid to late 1600s, in the colonies of what would become the United States, there was no such thing as the white race. Those of us of European descent did not refer to ourselves by that term really ever before then.

To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

Christianity neither is, nor ever was, part of the common law.

Culture is a slingshot moved by the force of its past

Europe has grown through crises. Each crisis also presents opportunities, and Europe has emerged stronger from each one. That is the way history unfolds. Europe is sometimes slow, and it reacts sluggishly, but it is capable of finding solutions.

[Turkish women] had lived free of the veil for 5,000 years, and had been covered only in the last 600 years.

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.

India is merely a geographical expression. It is no more a single country than the Equator

I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we're drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author.

An important impression was my father's one Sabbatical year, spent in England and Europe in 1937.

Study the past, if you would divine the future.

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin and culture is like a tree without roots.

The contents of someone's bookcase are part of his history, like an ancestral portrait.

Study history. Study history. In history lie all the secrets of statecraft.

By the time the traditionally male lexicographers become interested in looking at fashion words, their origins are lost in the mists of time.