Quotes about History

Don't believe that your history is your destiny.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

Judging from the main portion of the history of the world, so far, justice is always in jeopardy.

The wonder of the Exodus narrative is that the role of pharaoh continues to be reperformed in many times and many places. "Pharaoh" reappears in the course of history in the guise of coercive economic production. In every new performance, the character of Pharaoh makes claims to be absolute to perpetuity; the character is regularly propelled by fearful greed; the character imposes stringent economic demands on a vulnerable labor force.

history consists primarily of speaking and being answered, crying and being heard. If that is true, it means there can be no history in the empire because the cries are never heard and the speaking is never answered. And if the task of prophecy is to empower people to engage in history, then it means evoking cries that expect answers, learning to address them where they will be taken seriously, and ceasing to look to the numbed and dull empire that never intended to answer in the first place.

It is most unfortunate that, in the long history of the church, "faith" has been almost everywhere transubstantiated into "belief," which transposes the concrete practicality of trust into a cognitive enterprise. How ludicrous that in the long, oppressive history of orthodoxy—which guards cognitive formulations—that those who enforce right belief seem most often to be themselves unable or unwilling to engage in deep trust.

Prophecy in this context may be understood as a redescription of the public processes of history through which the purposes of Yahweh are given in human utterance.

Moses knows that prosperity breeds amnesia.

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.

A woman's whole life is a history of the affections.

A woman's life is a history of the affections.

For my part, I love to give myself up to the illusion of poetry. A hero of fiction that never existed is just as valuable to me as a hero of history that existed a thousand years ago.