Human History Quotes
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Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.
Edward Bellamy
Throughout human history, the apostles of purity, those who have claimed to possess a total explanation, have wrought havoc among mere mixed-up human beings. Like many millions of people, I am a bastard child of history. Perhaps we all are, black and brown and white, leaking into one another, as a character of mine once said, like flavours [sic] when you cook
Salman Rushdie
primitive times had required primitive obedience, that later generations evolved to the point where parents offered themselves as sacrifice - as in the dark knights of the ovens which pocked old earth history - and that current generations had to deny any command for sacrifice. Sol had written that whatever God now took in human consciousness - whether as a mere manifestation of the subconscious in all its revanchist needs or as a more conscious attempt at philosophical and ethical evolution...
Dan Simmons
But I am designed to last forever," said the expendable, "if not interfered with."Isn't that nice? Expendable yet eternal. You'll be able to go back and observe any part of human history that you wish. Watch the pyramids being unbuilt. See the ice ages go and come in reverse. Watch the de-extinction of the dinosaurs as a meteor leaps out of the Gulf of Mexico."I will have no useful task. I will not be able to help the human race in any way. My existence will have no meaning after you are...
Orson Scott Card
The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.
Terry Eagleton
Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest...
Robert Kennedy