Historical Quotes

One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.

In our twenties, when there is still so much time ahead of us, time that seems ample for a hundred indecisions, for a hundred visions and revisions—we draw a card, and we must decide right then and there whether to keep that card and discard the next, or discard the first card and keep the second. And before we know it, the deck has been played out and the decisions we have just made will shape our lives for decades to come.

My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

He shook his head, staring at her like a condemned man who beheld the face of his executioner. "Aline," he whispered, "Do you know what hell is?"
"Yes." Her eyes overflowed. "Trying to exist with your heart living somewhere outside your body."
"No. It's knowing that you have so little faith in my love, you would have condemned me to a lifetime of agony." His face contorted suddenly. "To something worse than death.

Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.

I must make up my mind which is right – society or I.

Love's stories written in love's richest books.
To fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes.

It touched me to be trusted with something terrible.

Damn, you're good,' he said and rolled onto his back. The man wasn't much for flowery speech, Alesandra thought with a smile. It didn't matter. She was arrogantly proud of herself because she'd pleased him. Perhaps she should give him a little praise too. She rolled onto her side to face him, put her hand on his chest directly over his pounded heart, and whispered. 'You're good, too. 'Tis the truth, you're the best I've ever had.'
He opened his eyes to look at her. 'I'm the only one you've ever had, remember?' His voice was gruff with affection.
'I remember,' she said.
'No other man is ever going to touch you, Alesandra. You're mine.

Cannibals? Who is not a cannibal? I tell you it will be more tolerable for the Fejee that salted down a lean missionary in his cellar against a coming famine; it will be more tolerable for that provident Fejee, I say, in the day of judgement, than for thee, civilized and enlightened gourmand, who nailest geese to the ground and feastest on their bloated livers in thy pate de fois gras.

This is the Lord's doing, and it is marvelous in our eyes.

Listening to him tell the story now, it was clear to Adam that Glendower was more than a historical figure to Gansey. He was everything Gansey wished he could be: wise and brave, sure of his path, touched by the supernatural, respected by all, survived by his legacy.

If I am never to have you again after this night, this moment, you will remain the wife of my soul. Keeper of my heart.

The historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence

لم يبحث الحسين عن شهادة دخول إلى الجنة أو لتأكيد دخولها, لقد كانت شهادة علينا. شهادة للأمة كلها, و للتاريخ, و للمقاومين بعد مئات السنين, لمواجهة أي يزيد يجئ, بمقاومة الحسين الوحيدة.
حجة علينا!
أن لا يقف أي واحد منا في أي مقام كنا, و يسأل:((ماذا أفعل و القوم كلهم ظلم, و العصر كله ظلام, و الرفاق انفضو, و الانصار رحلو؟)).

They were orphans of war, washed up on that little island in a tide of blood. What made them amazing wasn't that they had miraculous powers; that they had escaped the ghettos and gas chamges was miracle enough.

When a friend of Abigail and John Adams was killed at Bunker Hill, Abigail's response was to write a letter to her husband and include these words, "My bursting heart must find vent at my pen.

He wants a fifteen thousand pound settlement."
"Fifteen thousand!"
"He says you're a great deal of trouble."
She hesitated for one startled moment before choking back a laugh.
"I am."
"I thought so." He leveled Drew a look. "If I pay you the fifteen thousand, do you swear to keep her?"
Drew reared back his head. "Forever?"
Her father scowled. "Forever."
"Oh, I suppose." He gave a long-suffering sigh. "If I must."
She bit the insides of her cheeks to keep from laughing outright.

Such was the number of the barbarians, that when they shot forth their arrows the sun would be darkened by their multitude." Dieneces, not at all frightened at these words, but making light of the Median numbers, answered "Our Trachinian friend brings us excellent tidings. If the Medes darken the sun, we shall have our fight in the shade.

The greatest challenge of my life has been to see and accept the actual truth without great pain and struggle against it.

I want to talk to you. I want to listen to you. I want to walk with you and, yes, I want you in my bed. That's what I want today. That's what I'll want in a hundred years. If you promise to be my wife forever, I will pledge myself to your happiness.

When writing the constitution for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, John Adams wrote:
I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading.

Show us not the aim without the way.
For ends and means on earth are so entangled
That changing one, you change the other too;
Each different path brings other ends in view

We only need to wear shoes because the British built roads which hurt our feet.

People perish. Books are immortal.

I've fallen in love with you. I love you even now when you sit before me with the eyes of a wolf. So take pity upon the fool I have become. I forgot it was only a bargain between us.

Conformity is deformity

Calmly, slowly, she reached behind with her left hand and came up against — yes, fabric. Fine linen, to be precise. So far, so good: she was inside a wardrobe, after all. The only problem was that this linen was oddly warm. Body warm. Beneath the tentative pressure of her palm, it seemed to be moving...
With terrifying suddenness, an ungloved hand clamped roughly over her nose and mouth. A long arm pinned her arms against her sides. She was held tightly against a hard, warm surface.
"Hush," whispered a pair of lips pressed to her left ear. "If you scream, we are both lost.

He had taken George, my beloved George, from me. And he had taken my other self: Anne.

These trials aren't about revenge. They're about
justice.
Don't you want
justice
, Rose Justice?

It had never occurred to me that simply being with a fellow prisoner would make me feel like I was still in prison.

People do not ever change. The person you see later is merely the one that was hidden from you in the beginning.
Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon.

You frequently state, and in your letter you imply, that I have developed a completely one-sided outlook and look at everything in terms of science. Obviously my method of thought and reasoning is influenced by a scientific training – if that were not so my scientific training will have been a waste and a failure. But you look at science (or at least talk of it) as some sort of demoralizing invention of man, something apart from real life, and which must be cautiously guarded and kept separate from everyday existence. But science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment. Your theories are those which you and many other people find easiest and pleasantest to believe, but so far as I can see, they have no foundation other than they leaf to a pleasanter view of life (and an exaggerated idea of our own importance)...
I agree that faith is essential to success in life (success of any sort) but I do not accept your definition of faith, i.e. belief in life after death. In my view, all that is necessary for faith is the belief that by doing our best we shall come nearer to success and that success in our aims (the improvement of the lot of mankind, present and future) is worth attaining. Anyone able to believe in all that religion implies obviously must have such faith, but I maintain that faith in this world is perfectly possible without faith in another world…
It has just occurred to me that you may raise the question of the creator. A creator of what? ... I see no reason to believe that a creator of protoplasm or primeval matter, if such there be, has any reason to be interested in our significant race in a tiny corner of the universe, and still less in us, as still more significant individuals. Again, I see no reason why the belief that we are insignificant or fortuitous should lessen our faith – as I have defined it.

That first scream, my lord, was indeed your daughter, my wife, and if you kill me, your grandchild will be quite without a father. Won't you come in?

Schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme to return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements [of civilization]. Only birth can conquer death―the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new.

He breathed in hard. The stench of blood filled his lungs. Only now, for the first time, could he truly appreciate it.

Profanity is the expression of a lesser mind.

You are correct in saying that desires often come from things we cannot easily gain - mine, being that of your love. By all accounts, I do wish I could steal it. But I am not that sort of man. I will wait. Forever and a day...I will wait.

Men call women faithless, changeable, and though they say it in jealousy of their own ever-threatened sexual honor, there is some truth in it. We can change our life, our being; no matter what our will is, we are changed. As the moon changes yet is one, so we are virgin, wife, mother, grandmother. For all their restlessness, men are who they are; once they put on the man's toga they will not change again; so they make a virtue of that rigidity and resist whatever might soften it and set them free.

History tells us that six million Jews disappeared during that war. If there was no Holocaust, where did they go?' She shakes her head. 'All of that, and the world didn't learn anything. Look around. There's still ethnic cleansing. There's discrimination.

Bodies lay strewn all around. Turkish and Wallachian warriors caught in the intimate indiscriminate embrace of death.

Exercise care with what it is you do when you hold my heart in your hands. For it is my love that makes you special. When it is gone, you shall soon know it and you shall be special no more.
Shane KP O'Neill - The Gates Of Babylon

You were kidnapped not?"
"I was kidnapped."
"You were forced not into marriage?"
"I was forced into marriage."
"You want not an annulment?"
"I want not an annulment.

Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.

I love you, Louise Downe McCord. You drive me absolutely crazy sometimes, and this is one of those times, but I love you.

Ien stopped her voice with more kisses, more promises of a world filled with only them.

It is too late for me to learn your wisdom in this matter. From the time I knew aught, I have lived with a knight and his lady whose love lit and warmed the dark hall on winter's nights. Madam, my example comes not from any book of romance. My grandparents walked and breathed; they kissed and quarreled. This I must have, and I will seek it with the point of my knife in a bad husband's heart if I can find it no other way.

The beauty of a woman is that no two are the same. They are all different. It follows then that to be successful as a lover, you cannot make love to any two in the same way.

He knew what he had found here, a precious treasure that had remained hidden away for so long. To the right man, she could give more happiness and fulfilment than any amount of gold, or gems. Just by holding her in his arms, he knew this. He had the key to her heart in his hands. All he had to do was unlock her, and he would enjoy the most wondrous chest of delights. He knew it and he knew, too, that nothing would ever compensate him should he lose her.

Katie shook her head in dismay. I thought being poor was the worst thing that could happen to a girl.

No, Katie, the countess said in a clear voice. The worst thing is to be in love with one man and have to marry another.
—Katie O'Reilly to the Countess of Marbury