They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about,but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history.
From that original colony sprang seven names that still feature on the landscape: Roanoke (which has the distinction of being the first Indian word borrowed by English settlers), Cape Fear, Cape Hatteras, the Chowan and Neuse Rivers, Chesapeake, and Virginia. (Previously, Virginia had been called Windgancon, meaning "what gay clothes you wear" - apparently what the locals had replied when an early reconnoitering party had asked the place's name.)
All the golden societies of the past to which historians point and turn their wistful smiles have had what patience-players would call a discard pile. They operated on two levels with a slave class who worked, ate, slept, and died and a leisured class who reclined on one elbow and spoke. Naturally it is from this latter group that we learn what life at that time was like. It often makes charming reading but we can hardly take it to be the whole truth.
The Air Loom had been constructed by the Jacobins in Paris around the time of their coup d'etat in 1793. Just as they had corrupted the ideals of the Enlightenment to their despotic ends, so had they corrupted Enlightenment science. The secret of its power was pneumatic chemistry, the science of the invisible elements known as 'airs' or 'gases,' which had been developed by some of the great geniuses who had inspired the revolution.
When you’re alive, you don’t dwell on how you’re going to spend your time once you’re dead. You just figure you’re gone, and the rest will pretty much take care of itself.Or you think you’re not really going to die. You’re going to be the first person in the history of the world who doesn’t have to. Maybe that’s some kind of lie our brains tell us to keep us from going crazy while we’re alive.
I cannot say much for this Monarch's Sense--Nor would I if I could, for he was a Lancastrian. I suppose you know all about the Wars between him and the Duke of York who was on the right side; if you do not, you had better read some other History, for I shall not be very difuse in this, meaning by it only to vent my spleen against, and show my Hatred to all those people whose parties or principles do not suit with mine, and not to give information.
[Alon Johnson] Later wrote that, "coming through a battered building near a well known and dangerous doorway. I heard something unfamiliar -- the sound of excited voices somewhere in the distance. The significance of this babble seemed to escape the tired company, but to me it suggested a sudden and radical change in the situation. Important enough to risk being shot at by showing myself in the doorway. Nothing happened, so I stepped into the street,...
If history is to be creative, to anticipate a possible future without denying the past, it should, I believe, emphasize new possibilities by disclosing those hidden episodes of the past when, even if in brief flashes, people showed their ability to resist, to join together, occasionally to win. I am supposing, or perhaps only hoping, that our future may be found in the past's fugitive movements of compassion rather than in its solid centuries of warfare.
No fundo, os seres humanos não passam de veículos, ou locais de passagem, para os genes. De geração em geração, correm dentro de nós até nos esgotarem, como cavalos de corrida. Os genes não pensam no bem e no mal. Não querem saber se somos felizes ou infelizes. Para eles, não passamos de um meio para atingir um fim. Só pensam no que é mais eficaz do seu ponto de vista.
There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish.There is no free will. There are no variables.
Men wiser and more learned than I have discerned in history a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern. These harmonies are concealed from me. I can see only one emergency following upon another as wave follows upon wave, only one great fact with respect to which, since it is unique, there can be no generalizations; only one safe rule for the historian: that he should recognize in the development of human destinies the play of the contingent and the unforeseen.
Nobody can understand the greatness of the thirteenth century, who does not realize that it was a great growth of new things produced by a living thing. In that sense it was really bolder and freer than what we call the renaissance, which was a resurrection of old things discovered in a dead thing... and the Gospel according to St. Thomas... was a new thrust like the titanic thrust of Gothic engineering; and its strength was in a God that makes all things new.
Bukanlah kepercayaan religius yang menyebabkan individu-individu dan rakyat-rakyat Islam itu bertindak, walaupun mungkin kelihatannya seolah-olah demikian. Kepercayaan religius tidak membentuk hidup mereka; ini sering hanya merupakan alat di tangan pemerintah-pemerintah, kelas-kelas dan kelompok-kelompok. Islam merupakan suatu cermin yang digunakan oleh kepentingan-kepentingan tertentu untuk bercermin dan membenarkan diri - Minorsky (Jacques Duchesne Guillemin
We are so accustomed to thinking of European civilization as the vanguard of the world that we forget that for much of human history, the European peninsula was at the receiving end of the miracles of the East. Over the millennia, innovations such as Mesopotamian agriculture, the Phoenician alphabet, Greek philosophy, and Arab bookkeeping all flowed from east to west. Both Christianity and Islam followed the same route. So did wheat, olives, sugar, and spices.
Söylemek istediğim şu ki, medeniyet ihracı fikrine alışamıyorum ben. Çok değil, daha on sekizinci yüzyılla rayına giren endüstriyel dönemin başlangıcına kadar, şehirlerinin sokaklarından açık lağımlar akan ve tuvalet alışkanlığı bulunmayan bu insanlardan şimdi medeniyet dilemek zorunda kalmak bana zür geliyor.
