- “If you imagine the 4,500-bilion-odd years of Earth’s history compressed into a normal earthly day, then life begins very early, about 4 A.M., with the rise of the first simple, single-celled organisms, but then advances no further for the next sixteen hours. Not until almost 8:30 in the evening, with the day five-sixths over, has Earth anything to show the universe but a restless skin of microbes. Then, finally, the first sea plants appear, followed twenty minutes later by the first jellyfish and the enigmatic Ediacaran fauna first seen by Reginald Sprigg in Australia. At 9:04 P.M. trilobites swim onto the scene, followed more or less immediately by the shapely creatures of the Burgess Shale. Just before 10 P.M. plants begin to pop up on the land. Soon after, with less than two hours left in the day, the first land creatures follow. Thanks to ten minutes or so of balmy weather, by 10:24 the Earth is covered in the great carboniferous forests whose residues give us all our coal, and the first winged insects are evident. Dinosaurs plod onto the scene just before 11 P.M. and hold sway for about three-quarters of an hour. At twenty-one minutes to midnight they vanish and the age of mammals begins. Humans emerge one minute and seventeen seconds before midnight. The whole of our recorded history, on this scale, would be no more than a few seconds, a single human lifetime barely an instant. Throughout this greatly speeded-up day continents slide about and bang together at a clip that seems positively reckless. Mountains rise and melt away, ocean basins come and go, ice sheets advance and withdraw. And throughout the whole, about three times every minute, somewhere on the planet there is a flash-bulb pop of light marking the impact of a Manson-sized meteor or one even larger. It’s a wonder that anything at all can survive in such a pummeled and unsettled environment. In fact, not many things do for long.” ― Bill Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything
- “It is extraordinarily entertaining to watch the historians of the past … entangling themselves in what they were pleased to call the “problem” of Queen Elizabeth. They invented the most complicated and astonishing reasons both for her success as a sovereign and for her tortuous matrimonial policy. She was the tool of Burleigh, she was the tool of Leicester, she was the fool of Essex; she was diseased, she was deformed, she was a man in disguise. She was a mystery, and must have some extraordinary solution. Only recently has it occrurred to a few enlightened people that the solution might be quite simple after all. She might be one of the rare people were born into the right job and put that job first.” ― Dorothy L. Sayers, Are Women Human? Astute and Witty Essays on the Role of Women in Society
- “I know history. There are many names in historybut none of them are ours.” ― Richard Siken, Crush
- “Perhaps one day someone from a distant land will listen to this story of mine. Isn’t this what lies behind the desire to be inscribed in the pages of a book? Isn’t it just for the sake of this delight that sultans and viziers proffer bags of gold to have their histories written?” ― Orhan Pamuk, My Name Is Red
- Universal history is the history of a few metaphors. Jorge Luis Borges
- “After receiving USA citizenship, I have a hard time identifying as a citizen because the USA has an established history of mistreating me.” ― Steven Magee
- “Sure we all need money but what do you really focus on? It is a matter of the heart. If your thoughts are on material and worldly things, no good fruits can come out of it.Seek the kingdom of God first and the other things shall be added unto you not vice versa.” ― Patience Johnson, Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder
- I won’t predict anything historic. But nothing is impossible. Michael Phelps
- “It opens the mind toward an understanding of humannature and destiny. It increases wisdom. It is the veryessence of that much misinterpreted concept, a liberaleducation. It is the foremost approach to humanism,the lore of the specifically human concerns that distinguishman from other living beings. . . . Personal cultureis more than mere familiarity with the presentstate of science, technology, and civic affairs. It ismore than acquaintance with books and paintings andthe experience of travel and of visits to museums. It isthe assimilation of the ideas that roused mankind fromthe inert routine of a merely animal existence to a lifeof reasoning and speculating. It is the individual’seffort to humanize himself by partaking in the traditionof all the best that earlier generations havebequeathed.” ― Ludwig von Mises
- “Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.” ― Robert Penn Warren
- Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history – revisionist historians is what I like to call them. George W. Bush
- History never looks like history when you are living through it. John W. Gardner
- “I know this goes without saying, but Stonehenge really was the most incredible accomplishment. It took five hundred men just to pull each sarsen, plus a hundred more to dash around positioning the rollers. Just think about it for a minute. Can you imagine trying to talk six hundred people into helping you drag a fifty-ton stone eighteen miles across the countryside and muscle it into an upright position, and then saying, ‘Right, lads! Another twenty like that, plus some lintels and maybe a couple of dozen nice bluestones from Wales, and we can party!’ Whoever was the person behind Stonehenge was one dickens of a motivator, I’ll tell you that.” ― Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island
- “Its not your fault for not being there.Its my fault for thinking you would be” ― Abhishek Shukla, Feelings Undefined: The Charm of the Unsaid Vol. 1
- The history of liberty is a history of resistance. Woodrow Wilson
- “…most people in the ancient world, did not make a sharp distinction between myth and reality. The two were intimately tied together in their spiritual experience. That is to say, they were less interested in what actually happened, than in what it meant. It would have been perfectly normal, indeed expected, for a writer in the ancient world, to tell tales of gods and heroes, whose fundamental facts would have been recognized as false, but whose underlying message would have been seen as true.” ― Reza Aslan, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
- “It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.” ― Sebastian Barry, The Secret Scripture
- “Stop explaining to others, people will only understand from their level of discernment.” ― Abhishek Shukla, The Reflection “Success or Stress”Choose Wisely
- “Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.” ― Plato
- “It is truth, in the old saying, that is ‘the daughter of time,’ and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that ‘history’ had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.” ― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays
- “My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” ― Elie Wiesel, Night
- “There is nothing in which mankind have been more unanimous [founding nations upon superstition]; yet nothing can be inferred from it more than this, that the multitude have always been credulous, and the few artful. The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature: and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history… [T]he detail of the formation of the American governments… may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had any interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the inspiration of heaven… it will for ever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses… Thirteen governments thus founded on the natural authority of the people alone, without a pretence of miracle or mystery, which are destined to spread over the northern part of that whole quarter of the globe, are a great point gained in favour of the rights of mankind.[A Defence of the Constitutions of the United States of America, 1787]” ― John Adams, The Political Writings of John Adams
- “This book is about what may be the most important thing that has ever happened in human history. Believe it or not—and I know that most people do not—violence has declined over long stretches of time, and today we may be living in the most peaceable era in our species’ existence. The decline, to be sure, has not been smooth; it has not brought violence down to zero; and it is not guaranteed to continue. But it is an unmistakable development, visible on scales from millennia to years, from the waging of wars to the spanking of children.” ― Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
- “The only difference between success and failure is Lack of Vision” ― Abhishek Shukla, KISS Life “Life is what you make it”
- “If there is a Creator-God, it has used methods of creation that are indistinguishable from nature, it has declined to make itself known for all of recorded history, it doesn’t intervene in affairs on earth, and has made itself impossible to observe. Even if you believe in that God… why would you think it would want to be worshiped?” ― David G. McAfee, Mom, Dad, I’m an Atheist: The Guide to Coming Out as a Non-Believer
- “Sometimes even a “Yes” can be fatal for our Souls” ― Abhishek Shukla, The Reflection “Success or Stress”Choose Wisely
- “Like voices humming along a telegraph wire, Evie thought. That was how to teach it. One could rest one’s hand upon the past, feel the vibrato, one could close one’s eyes, lean low and listen hard. If you were paying attention, one could hear the voices underneath the past. And that was time.” ― Sarah Blake, The Guest Book
- “There is no force in Earth or Heaven above,No, not even the damned of Hell can stop relentless Love. —Kari, The Valkyrie, Chapter Sixteen,Valley of the Damned Epic Martial Poem/Allegory” ― douglas m laurent
- Men make history and not the other way around. In periods where there is no leadership, society stands still. Progress occurs when courageous, skillful leaders seize the opportunity to change things for the better. Harry S. Truman
- “Passion + Vision +Skill + Mentoring = Success.” ― Abhishek Shukla, KISS Life “Life is what you make it”