Stephen Fry Quotes
History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.
Quotes to Explore
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Our own CIA has a storied history of interfering in elections. In the late '40s, we shoveled cash into France and Italy after World War II to defeat the Communists who had been part of the wartime resistance to the Nazis and Fascists.
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One of the most important things you can do in your life is to learn to pull back the curtain of fear so you can see it for what it really is - the enemy blowing a lot of smoke and pushing your buttons.
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My mom is awesome. She's really young. My mom is 40, and she raised me listening to Nirvana and Courtney Love and Coldplay, Gin Blossoms, The Cranberries, and stuff. Like, my early, early memories are of being a little kid running around in floral skirts and Doc Martens when I was, like, three.
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The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards.
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History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.
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History is a set of lies agreed upon.
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During the 1990s, San Francisco lived through one of the most intense economic booms of its history.
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A lot of my childhood memories involve walking home in floods of tears. At that age, feeling unpopular is difficult to handle.
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I get people to this day - I won my title 25 years ago - saying how wonderful a time they had during that dark period in our history when they came to watch me fight.
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I have a long view of history - my orientation is archaeological because I'm always thinking in terms of ancient Greece and Rome, ancient Persia and Egypt.
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All art becomes history as soon as it is made, so it is inevitably part of a tradition. It doesn't matter a toss if it is in paint or in film; it is all art.
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People ask me whether I see 'Star Wars' as a comedy or a tragedy, but it's really neither - it's partly a history, like 'Henry V,' and partly a fantasy, like 'The Tempest.'
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I wish that they had the freedoms like the Japanese and the Koreans and the Mexicans and everybody else that has that freedom to come over here and play the game, because I know Cuba has a very strong baseball history.
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An enemy to whom you show kindness becomes your friend, excepting lust, the indulgence of which increases its enmity.
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Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.
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Memories are like mulligatawny soup in a cheap restaurant. It is best not to stir them.
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Human blunders usually do more to shape history than human wickedness.
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As a philosopher sympathetic to Foucault recently remarked to me, Foucault failed in each of his major inquiries and, in desperation, went further afield from his areas of expertise. The History of Sexuality is a disaster. Page after page is sheer fantasy, unsupported by the ancient or modern historical record.
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We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.
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Insider trading by hedge funds has a long and distinguished history, dating to the days when people didn't know that there was such a thing as a hedge fund.
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The phenomenon of dreaming ... helped to build up the notion of an unreal or spiritual world; and in general, all the conditions of savage dawn-life so strongly conduced toward a feeling of the supernatural, that we need not wonder at the thoroughness with which man's very hereditary essence has become saturated with religion and superstition.
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Thought does not ennoble us and neither does it differentiate humans from other animals.
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History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even - if we dare, and we should dare - a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.
