Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
101-110 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 101-110 111-120 121-130 131-140 141-150 >
101) Nations, then, are imaginary constructs that depend for their existence on an apparatus of cultural fictions in which imaginative literature plays a decisive role. (Timothy Brennan 49) [SoundBite #101]
102) But in general there has been a reluctance to consider historical narratives as what they most manifestly are: verbal fictions, the contents of which are as much invented as found and the forms of which have more in common with their counterparts in literature than they have with those in the sciences. (Hayden White, Tropics 82) [SoundBite #102]
103) The point is clear. Our young people are woefully ill-educated about the history and basic principles of our nation and our civilization. (William J. Bennett, Children 161) [SoundBite #103]
104) Evidence is of course the lifeblood of history. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. ix) [SoundBite #104]
105) What is history for? . . . My answer is that history is "for" human self-knowledge. It is generally thought to be of importance to man that he should know himself: where knowing himself means knowing not his merely personal peculiarities, the things that distinguish him from other men, but his nature as man. . . . The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is. (R. G. Collingwood 10) [SoundBite #105]
106) Whereas in the nineteen-fifties the [history] texts were childish in the sense that they were naïve and clumsy, they are now childish in the sense that they are polymorphous-perverse. (Frances FitzGerald, America 16) [SoundBite #106]
107) History is able to instruct without inflicting pain by affording an insight into the failures and successes of others. (Diodorus of Agyrium, c. 50 B.C.) [SoundBite #107]
108) The philosopher Etienne Gilson noted the special significance of the perspectives history affords. History, he remarked, is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought. (National Standards for United States History 1) [SoundBite #108]
109) The historian must have no country. (John Adams, qtd. in Loewen, Lies My 14) [SoundBite #109]
110) We don't want complicated icons. (James W. Loewen 35) [SoundBite #1269]
