zed > zed 's Quotes

“Get fit. Live the active life. Make the army your chorea”
― David Ireland

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day. You shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”
― Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Recounting the experience of individuals brings home, as nothing else can, the sheer complexity of the choices they had to make, and the difficult and often opaque nature of the situations they confronted. Contemporaries could not see things as clearly as we can, with the gift of hindsight: they could not know in 1930 what was to come in 1933, they could not know in 1933 what was to come in 1939 or 1942 or 1945. If they had known, doubtless the choices they made would have been different. One of the greatest problems in writing history is to imagine oneself back in the world of the past, with all the doubts and uncertianties people faced in dealing with a future that for the historian has also become the past. Developments that seem inevitable in retrospect were by no means so at the time, and in writing this book I have tried to remind the reader repeatedly that things could easily have turned out very differently to the way they did at a number of points in the history of Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing. These conditions included not only the historical context in which they lived, but also the way in which they thought, the assumptions they acted upon, and the principles and beliefs that informed their behavior. A central aim of this book is to re-create all these things for a modern readership, and to remind readers that, to quote another well-known aphorism about history, 'the past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.”
― Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

“Narrative history fell out of fashion for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians everywhere focused on analytical approaches derived mainly from the social sciences. But a variety of recent, large-scale narrative histories have shown that it can be done without sacrificing analytical rigour or explanatory power.”
― Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich

“I don't know where I'm going from here, but I promise it won't be boring.”
― David Bowie

“I am not interested in being original. I am interested in being true.”
― Agostinho da Silva

“Never be afraid to sit awhile and think.”
― Lorraine Hansberry

“Consistent only with his own warped and peculiar brand of logic, he was prepared to take measures with such far-reaching consequences for the German population that the very survival he claimed to be fighting for was fundamentally threatened. Ultimately, the continued existence of the German people – if it showed itself incapable of defeating its enemies – was less important to him than the refusal to capitulate.”
― Ian Kershaw, Hitler, Vol. 2: 1936-1945 Nemesis

“Europeans showed in 1900 much the same confidence in the continuing success of their culture as the Chinese elite had shown in theirs a century earlier. The past, they were sure, proved them right.”
― J.M. Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“Civilization is the name we give to the interaction of human beings in a very creative way, when, as it were, a critical mass of cultural potential and a certain surplus of resources have been built up.”
― J M Roberts, The Penguin History of the World

“The most difficult thing for a wise woman to do is to pretend to be a foolish one.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Mrs Craddock

“Revolutions are like earthquakes: they are always being predicted, and sometimes they come.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“What we designate modernity was not something natural or automatic. It involved a set of difficult-to-attain attributes—mass production, mass culture, mass politics—that the greatest powers mastered. Those states, in turn, forced other countries to attain modernity as well, or suffer the consequences, including defeat in war and possible colonial conquest.”
― Stephen Kotkin, Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878-1928

“Life has no remote....get up and change it yourself!”
― Mark A. Cooper, Operation Einstein

“Before there is science, there are stories to explain the world. They make it happier somehow.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Love is not weakness. It's the bravest act of our lives.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“The Queen gave no reply. A calmness had come over here. One born from being pushed beyond the Queen’s limit.

No punishment, no act of vengeance, no war, no amount of blood, and no retribution that the realm had already seen, would hold a candle to what she would bring”
― L.P. Cowling, A Flood of Faith and Folly

“This,” He started, giving a sudden twinge of his hips so that Ariana could feel the intensity of his throbbing within her. “And you, are mine.”
― L.P. Cowling, A Flood of Faith and Folly

“[Greens] don't come through the back door the same as other groceries. They don't cower at the bottom of paper bags marked 'Liberty.' They wave over the top. They don't stop to be checked off the receipt. They spill out onto the counter. No going onto shelves with cans in orderly lines like school children waiting for recess. No waiting, sometimes for years beyond the blue sell by date, to be picked up and taken from the shelf. Greens don't stack or stand at attention. They aren't peas to be pushed around. Cans can't contain them. Boxed in they would burst free. Greens are wild. Plunging them into a pot took some doing. Only lobsters fight more. Either way, you have to use your hands. Then, retrieving them requires the longest of my mother's wooden spoons, the one with the burnt end. Swept onto a plate like the seaweed after a storm, greens sit tall, dark, and proud.”
― Georgia Scott, American Girl: Memories That Made Me

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
― Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte