We are here to advance the cause of women and to advance the cause of democracy and to make it absolutely clear that the two are inseparable.
Within the existing neoliberal historical conjuncture, there is a merging of violence and governance and the systemic disinvestment in and breakdown of institutions and public spheres that have provided the minimal conditions for democracy.
Most of the great results of history are brought about by discreditable means.
Every step we take towards making the State our Caretaker of our lives, by that much we move toward making the State our Master.
Whole swaths of the book [Lincoln in the Bardo] are made up of verbatim quotes from various historical sources, which I cut up and rearranged to form part of the narrative.
Research is always a very necessary part of my process because all of my books to this point have been historical. Time spent in the library adds to one's wealth as a writer or artist.
In those fifty, the Old Man made me take religion seriously. I'd never been religious, but he told us that religion is important whether or not we believed in one, the same way that historical events are important whether or not you personally lived through them.
You can never deny the immense talent, rock credibility and iconic historical contribution that Van Halen made.
Stupidity is sometimes the greatest of historical forces.
Truth is treason in the empire of lies.
Nothing will stop us. The road to the stars is steep and dangerous. But we're not afraid. . . Space flights can't be stopped. This isn't the work of one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.
I want to see books taken out of historical time and placed into a different timeline, such as evolutionary or geological time, as a means of putting the human experience in context.
History is not a web woven with innocent hands. Among all the causes which degrade and demoralize men, power is the most constant and most active.
Historical methodology, as I see it, is a product of common sense applied to circumstances.
They [the critics] deal with Schoenberg's early works and all their wealth by classifying them, with the music-historical cliché, as late romantic post-Wagnerian. One might just as well dispose of Beethoven as a late-classicist post-Haydnerian.
In my work, there's mechanism that is "real," which is formed from the historical concepts of the images that I'm working with. That doesn't fall completely into a cliché. There are elements about it that carry historical context and edges.
The ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the landlord class forced them into numerous uprisings against its rule. . . . It was the class struggles of the peasants, the peasant uprisings and peasant wars that constituted the real motive force of historical development in Chinese feudal society.
The most important element of a free society, where individual rights are held in the highest esteem, is the rejection of the initiation of violence.
Moreover, the eye contains a big flaw: the retina is inside out. Why would an almighty designer do such a thing? No intelligent designer,. . would put such a clumsy arrangement in a camcorder, and this is just one of the hundreds of accidents frozen in evolutionary history that confirm the mindlessness of the historical process.
I'm sorry to say it has some historical analogs. It's kind of reminiscent of what happened in Germany in the late Weimar years.