Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.
421-430 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]
< 401-410 411-420 421-430 431-440 441-450 >
421) The future is dark, the present burdensome; only the past, dead and finished, bears contemplation. Those who look upon it have survived it; they are its products and its victors. No wonder, therefore, that men concern themselves with history. (Geoffrey Elton 11) [SoundBite #421]
422) A picture is worth a thousand words. (old saying) [SoundBite #422]
423) Americans see history as a straight line and themselves standing at the cutting edge of it as representatives for all mankind. (Frances Fitzgerald, Fire 8) [SoundBite #423]
424) The ferocity of the current argument about how United States history should be taught reveals the important fact that the stories recounted about the past have power. (Joyce Appleby et. al. 157) [SoundBite #424]
425) I do not know if there is any other field of knowledge which suffers so badly as history from the sheer blind repetitions that occur year after year, and book to book. (Herbert Butterfield, qtd. in Vaughn 222) [SoundBite #425]
426) History is a window in which people of the present can look into the past and perhaps see how much has occurred or in some cases how much regression has taken place. Without the opportunity to look into the past we as humans lose the knowledge and the power to prevent the same mistakes from re-occuring. As it has been said "History repeats itself." (Jessica Roche, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #426]
427) Why do myths attach themselves to some individuals (living or dead) and not to others? . . . In my view, the central element in the explanation of this mythogenesis is the perception (conscious or unconscious) of a "fit" in some respect or respects between a particular individual and a current stereotype of a hero or villain. (Peter Burke 104) [SoundBite #427]
428) The distinction between historian and poet is not in the one writing prose and the other verse. You might put the work of Herodotus into verse, and it would still be a species of history. [The distinction is] that the one describes the thing that has been and the other a kind of thing that might be. (Aristotle, qtd. in Hamerow 240) [SoundBite #428]
429) The public does not expect an introduction to historians' debates when watching a film about the past. Rarely do films point direct to historiographical questions, and they almost never give specific attention to the scholars who are behind them. Yet films, by their presentation of evidence and attempts to draw conclusions, take sides. (Robert Brent Toplin, "Filmmaker" 1218) [SoundBite #429]
430) It is not surprising that most modern historians have accepted E. A. Freeman's dictum that "History is past politics, past politics present history." (Henry Steele Commager 20) [SoundBite #110]
