Time

"Beauteous Night lay dead Under the pall of twilight, and the love-star sickened and shrank."

"Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table;"

"The sunbeams dropped Their gold, and, passing in porch and niche, Softened to shadows, silvery, pale, and dun, As if the very Day paused and grew Eve."

"Alone, what did Bloom feel? The cold of interstellar space, thousands of degrees below freezing point or the absolute zero of Fahrenheit, Centigrade or Réaumur: the incipient intimations of proximate dawn."

"Twilight remained, a fairy half-light in which all things looked much more charming than they really were."

"But look, the morn, in russet mantle clad, Walks o'er the dew of yon high eastward hill."

"The hour before the heavenly-harness'd team Begins his golden progress in the east."

"History does not warehouse well in neatly labeled boxes, for events do not exist in quarantined isolation. They exist on a broad spectrum, and all influence and shape each other. Historical episodes are rarely built on the ground of a single foundation. Most are the product of a tangled web of influences and cascading cause-and-effect relationships within a broader historical narrative."

"Memory plays tricks that history corrects."

"We have been taught, inside the classroom and outside of it, that there exists an entity called the West, and that one can think of this West as a society and civilization independent of and in opposition to other societies and civilizations [i.e. the East]. Many of us even grew up believing that this West has [an autonomous] genealogy, according to which ancient Greece begat Rome, Rome begat Christian Europe, Christian Europe begat the Renaissance, the Renaissance the Enlightenment, the Enlightenment political democracy and the industrial revolution. Industry, crossed with democracy, in turn yielded the United States, embodying the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... [This is] misleading, first, because it turns history into a moral success story, a race in time in which each [Western] runner of the race passes on the torch of liberty to the next relay. History is thus converted into a tale about the furtherance of virtue, about how the virtuous [i.e. the West] win out over the bad guys [the East]."

"We start from scratch, every generation. History does not bend inevitably toward justice, or freedom, or decency, or even stability. History doesn’t do that in Hong Kong, or in Moscow, or in Washington or New York City or Los Angeles. History goes where we push it. And if we don’t push, someone else will."

"Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it."

"History has a way of reducing individuals to flat, two-dimensional portraits. it is the enemy of subjectivity, which is why Stephen Dedalus called it "a nightmare from which I am trying to awake". If we think of Kierkegaard, of Nietzsche, of Hölderlin, we see them standing alone, outside of history. They are spotlighted by their intensity, and the background is all darkness. They intersect history, but are not a part of it. There is something anti-history about such men; they are not subject to time, accident and death, but their intensity is a protest against it. I have elsewhere called such men "Outsiders" because they attempt to stand outside history. which defines humanity on terms of limitation, not of possibility."

"Those old credulities, to nature dear, Shall they no longer bloom upon the stock Of History."

"We are apt to suppose that the facts in any branch of meaning must be in some way open to direct inspection, and that the statements of experts in each branch can be tested by their conformity with them ... The most striking thing about history is that the facts it purports to describe are past facts; and past facts are no longer accessible to direct inspection. We cannot, in a word, test the accuracy of historical statements by simply seeing whether they correspond to a reality which is independently known. How then can we test them? … ... we do so by referring to historical evidence. Although the past is not accessible to direct inspection it has left ample traces of itself in the present, in the shape of documents, buildings, coins, institutions, procedures and so forth."

"Anything but history, for history must be false."

"Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe."

"All our ancient history, as one of our wits remarked, is no more than accepted fiction."

"Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it's gossip with some point to it. That's why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true."

"L'histoire n'est que le tableau des crimes et des malheurs."

"The history of the world has been one not of conquest, as supposed; it has been one of ennui."

"It is always a part of the misfortunes of the vanquished that their portraits are painted and their history written by the victors."

"Those who insist that history is simply the effort to tell the thing exactly as it was, to state the facts, are confronted with the difficulty that the fact which they would represent is not planted on the solid ground of fixed conditions; it is in the midst and is itself a part of the changing currents, the complex and interacting influences of the time, deriving its significance as a fact from its relations to the deeper-seated movements of the age, movements so gradual that often only the passing years can reveal the truth about the fact and its right to a place on the historian’s page."

"It goes against the grain for me to do what so often happens, to speak inhumanly about the great as if a few millennia were an immense distance. I prefer to speak humanly about it, as if it happened yesterday, and let only the greatness itself be the distance."

"The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice."

"Beyond the drumfire of daily crisis, therefore, there is arising the outlines of a robust and vital world community, founded on nations secure in their own independence, and united by their allegiance to world peace. It would be foolish to say that this world will be won tomorrow, or the day after. The processes of history are fitful and uncertain and aggravating. There will be frustrations and setbacks. There will be times of anxiety and gloom. The specter of thermonuclear war will continue to hang over mankind; and we must heed the advice of Oliver Wendell Holmes of "freedom leaning on her spear" until all nations are wise enough to disarm safely and effectively. Yet we can have a new confidence today in the direction in which history is moving. Nothing is more stirring than the recognition of great public purpose. Every great age is marked by innovation and daring--by the ability to meet unprecedented problems with intelligent solutions. In a time of turbulence and change, it is more true than ever that knowledge is power; for only by true understanding and steadfast judgment are we able to master the challenge of history. If this is so, we must strive to acquire knowledge--and to apply it with wisdom."

"To say that the future will be different from the present is, to scientists, hopelessly self-evident. I observe regretfully that in politics, however, it can be heresy. It can be denounced as radicalism, or branded as subversion. There are people in every time and every land who want to stop history in its tracks. They fear the future, mistrust the present, and invoke the security of a comfortable past which, in fact, never existed. It hardly seems necessary to point out in California - of all States -- that change, although it involves risks, is the law of life."

"I think of myself as a historian more than as a statesman. As a historian, you have to be conscious of the fact that every civilization that has ever existed has ultimately collapsed. History is a tale of efforts that failed, of aspirations that weren't realized, of wishes that were fulfilled and then turned out to be different from what one expected. So, as a historian, one has to live with a sense of the inevitability of tragedy. As a statesman, one has to act on the assumption that problems must be solved."

"To ingenious attempts at explaining by the light of reason things which want the light of history to show their meaning, much of the learned nonsense of the world has indeed been due."

"Because the litigated case creates a record, courts can become archives in which that record serves as the materialization of memory. Due process guarantees an opportunity to be heard by, and an opportunity to speak to, the future. It is the guarantee that legal institutions can be turned into museums of unnecessary, unjust, undeserved pain and death. The legal hearing provides lawyers and litigants an opportunity to write and record history by creating narratives of present injustices, and to insist on memory in the face of denial. By recording such history and constructing such narratives lawyers and litigants call on an imagined future to choose Justice over the “jurispathic” tendencies of the moment."

"Here our interest is directed to the temporal dimension of legality, the way law stands in relation to the past, the present, and the future. Law in the modern era is, we believe, one of the most important of our society’s technologies for preserving memory. Just as the use of precedent to legitimate legal decisions fixes law in a particular relation to the past, memory may be attached, or attach itself, to law and be preserved in and through law. Where this is the case, it serves as one way of orienting ourselves to the future. As Drucilla Cornell puts it: “Legal interpretation demands that we remember the future.” In that phrase, Cornell reminds us that there are, in fact, two audiences for every legal act, the audience of the present and the audience of the future. Law materializes memory in documents, transcripts, written opinions; it reenacts the past, both intentionally and unconsciously, and it is one place where the present speaks to the future through acts of commemoration."

"Law is one site to both “remember the future” and to insure that the future remembers. Perhaps by paying attention to how law serves memory we can gain new understandings of law’s crucial role in knitting together our past, present and future. Perhaps by attending to the contestation that inevitably accompanies efforts to materialize memory in law we can gain a better understanding of the ways that social conflict plays itself out on the terrain of remembrance."

"The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations."

"I sometimes think that we are too much impressed by the clamor of daily events. The newspaper headlines and the television screens give us a short view. They so flood us with the stop-press details of daily stories that we lose sight of one of the great movements of history. Yet it is the profound tendencies of history and not the passing excitements that will shape our future."

"Purpose has no place in biology, but history has no meaning without it."

"History is the unbroken march of struggle to advance humanity."

"The absence from the Dead Sea Scrolls of historical texts proper should not surprise us. Neither in the inter-Testamental period, nor in earlier biblical times, was the recording of history as we understand it a strong point among the Jews."

"The greater part of what passes for diplomatic history is little more than the record of what one clerk said to another clerk."

"It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature."

"Today's banalities apparently gain in profundity if one states that the wisdom of the past, for all its virtues, belongs to the past. The arrogance of those who come later preens itself with the notion that the past is dead and gone. … The modern mind can no longer think thought, only can locate it in time and space. The activity of thinking decays to the passivity of classifying."

"I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past, — so good night!"

"What we know of the past is mostly not worth knowing. What is worth knowing is mostly uncertain. Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter."

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach."

"History does not relate any true revolution which came from power. All began with education and meant in essence a moral summons."

"History," Stephen said, "is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake."

"In this valley of trees and river and crystal, the fault lines of history broke."

"It is not the neutrals or the lukewarm who make history."

"In the end, young people are at risk of being disinherited from their community if that community lacks the courage and confidence to teach its history."

"There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present."

"A generation which ignores history has no past — and no future."