If you are not open to the unprecedented, you will repeat history. If you are open to the unprecedented, you will change history. The difference is prayer.

Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.

We aren't haunted by the dead, but by the impossible reach of history. By how unknowable these others are to us, how unfathomable we'd be to them.

More than ever, we are dealing with the history of the masses, and no history of individuals. Less than ever, it is possible to predict the near future ...

Revolutionary moments often seem to occur in history when large numbers of individuals have a change in consciousness, regarding themselves and their status

Old books exert a strange fascination for me -- their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt.

Yankee Stadium, it’s like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.

Mostly though, they waited. For the mail. For the news. For the bells. For breakfast and lunch and dinner. For one day to be over and the next day to begin.

We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.

My first reaction, every time I delve into an episode of history that I don’t know very much about, is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.

It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

History has to live with what was here,clutching and close to fumbling all we had -it is so dull and gruesome how we die,unlike writing, life never finishes.

History is as light as individual human life, unbearably light, light as a feather, as dust swirling into the air, as whatever will no longer exist tomorrow.

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

For historians, creative writers provide a kind of pornography. They break the rules and admit the thing that is imagined, but is not licensed to be imagined.