Wordgrove Post & Review

Check for expanded History Quote Page, Monday, 08/17

 

 

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Quoted in The Grove:   Prompt — history

It is a great pity that every human being does not, at an early stage of his life, have to write a historical work. He would then realize that the human race is in quite a jam about truth.
~Rebecca West

It might be a good idea if the various countries of the world would occasionally swap history books, just to see what other people are doing with the same set of facts.
~Bill Vaughan

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.
~Dick Gregory

EndQuote:
Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.
~African Proverb

 

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Exercise Prompt for 08/23:  center

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It is pleasant to be transferred from an office where one is afraid of a sergeant-major into an office where one can intimidate generals, and perhaps this is why history is so attractive to the more timid among us. We can recover self-confidence by snubbing the dead.
~E M Forster

How these curiosities would be quite forgot, did not such idle fellows as I am put them down!
~John Aubrey

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.
~John Still

The past actually happened but history is only what someone wrote down.
~A Whitney Brown

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God cannot alter the past, though historians can.
~Samuel Butler

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
~George Orwell

Perhaps nobody has changed the course of history as much as the historians.
~Franklin P Jones

The lovers of romance can go elsewhere for satisfaction but where can the lovers of truth turn if not to history?
~Katharine Anthony

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Posted from the Grove

A society in stable equilibrium is-by definition-one that has no history and wants no historians.
~Henry Adams

Sin writes histories, goodness is silent.
~Goethe

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history-books.
~Thomas Carlyle

Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks. Historians are pessimists because they ignore the banks for the river.
~Will Durant

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~New Acropolis Charlotte:  Clio – Muse of History   (0:30)   quick introduction
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_skcSXPmWYhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_skcSXPmWY

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~Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell:  What Happened Before History? Human Origins   (10:05) Curious? A short history
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGiQaabX3_o

 

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A new future requires a new past.
~Eric Foner

He wrote victories with the national pen.
~Terri Guillemets

History is the propaganda of the victors.
~Ernst Toller

The victor will never be asked if he told the truth.
~Adolf Hitler

No modern idea has affected history more than the passion of nationalism.
~Charles R Poinsatte

Wars usually have the effect of speeding up the process of history.
~Pieter Geyl

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VIDEO:

History is past politics, and politics present history.
~John Robert Seeley

There certainly is no useful or entertaining history but the history of the day.
~Voltaire

The obscurest epoch is today.
~Robert Louis Stevenson

Truly great history is not subtle. It smacks you in the face. You know it at the time you’re watching it — you’re seeing something that’s for the ages.
~Tom Verducci

I don’t know much about history, and I wouldn’t give a nickel for all the history in the world. History is more or less bunk. It is a tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.
~Henry Ford

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~Thirty Seconds to Mars:  From Yesterday   (13:29)   short fantasy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JCl0O0oWlA

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~Ben and Garry:  Yesterday’s Light   (4:37)   dreamy dawn
https://vimeo.com/260231285

 

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All ancient histories, as one of our wits has observed, are only fables that men have agreed to admit as true; and with regard to modern history, it is a chaos out of which it is impossible to make anything…
~Voltaire

That is the triumph of history – truth absolute is not at hand; the original with which to match the copy does not exist.
~Jacques Barzun

History being the record of human action is a richly variegated material, and it is not easy to give a true impression of the stuff by snipping off an inch or two for a pattern.
~Cicely Veronica Wedgwood

The notion that any one person can describe ‘what really happened’ is an absurdity. If ten – or a hundred – people witness an event, there will be ten – or a hundred – different versions of what took place.
~David and Leigh Eddings

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.
~Henry Steele Commanger

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MUSIC:

The past is really almost as much a work of the imagination as the future.
~Jessamyn West

Historians have powerful imaginations, which are essential and dangerous.
~Robert Stinson

The historian has before him a jigsaw puzzle from which many pieces have disappeared. These gaps can be filled only by his imagination.
~Gaetano Salvemini

History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases.
~William Stubbs

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~Yesterday (movie – Beatles cover):  Yesterday   (4:17)   old, new again

-or-

~Billie Eilish:  Yesterday   (Beatles cove – 3:51)   In Memoriam

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~Boyz II Men:  It’s So Hard To Say Goodbye To Yesterday   (3:04)   farewell, in song

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~Tame Impala:  Lost in Yesterday   (4:19)   love in retrograde

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~Biffy Clyro:  Instant History   (3:45)   deliberative rock

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Guns N’ Roses:  Yesterdays   (3:19)   rocker’s no regrets

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~Cari Cari:  Nothing’s Older Than Yesterday   (3:46)   touring Tokyo to music

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~Charles Aznavour:  Yesterday When I Was Young – Glen Campbell cover  (3:31)
expressive, elegant with age and presence – recommended

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~Kristina Koropecki/Mark Berube:  Yesterday’s Halo   (5:40)   pleasantly different

 

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The future is dark, the present burdensome. Only the past, dead and buried, bears contemplation.
~G R Elton

Every true history must force us to remember that the past was once as real as the present and as uncertain as the future.
~George Macaulay Trevelyan

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It takes a great deal of history to produce a little literature.
~Henry James

It takes an endless amount of history to make even a little tradition.
~Henry James

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Shortest horror story in history: Tomorrow is Monday.
~author unknown

Relationships would be easier if people came with a Clear History Button.
~author unknown

History always tells a story… That’s why you must always clear it before your dad uses the computer!
~author unknown

There’s an old saying about those who forget history. I don’t remember it, but it’s good.
~Stephen Colbert

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History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.
~Alexis de Tocqueville

History is a kind of introduction to more interesting people than we can possibly meet in our restricted lives; let us not neglect the opportunity.
~Dexter Perkins

History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances.
~Donald Creighton

Some people make headlines while others make history.
~Philip Elmer-DeWitt

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All history becomes subjective; in other words there is properly no history, only biography.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

History is the essence of innumerable biographies.
~Thomas Carlyle

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.
Thomas Carlyle

Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever.
~Napoleon Bonaparte

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@Writers Platform

History begins in novel and ends in essay.
~Thomas Babington Macaulay

Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.
~Plato

Hence poetry is something more philosophic and of graver import than history, since its statements are rather of the nature of universals, whereas those of history are singulars.
~Aristotle

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.
~Thomas Carlyle

 

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Exercise Prompt:  history

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Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.
~Walter Savage Landor

History does not merely touch on language, but takes place in it.
~Theodor Adorno

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.
~Robert Penn Warren

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~BarTalk:     Warning:  following exercises not to be confused with poetry

A-mused #16

Clio and Calliope
History versus Poetry
Clio’s research incomplete
Calliope felled by story’s need
Enter Erato, the lover’s muse
Lights up history, the poet’s fuse

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Portrait

A scratched and sketchy record
Bloated history unbecoming
Chasing voters, voters running
Future’s past next train arriving
National polls at election time
Swamped by slime, tides of crime
Votes it out, a just reward

Under clouds instead of sunning
Bowed to money as his lord
Reap moldy harvest of discord
Walked the plank at point of sword
Chose graft ‘n grift instead of duty
Dropped the ball this time this fall
Lost the game he might have won in

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Accounts Payable

Assignation was the question
Was herstory more true than history
Or his story pure desperation
Secret rendezvous, it’s true
Bottom line his boasts untrue
Character assassination his reply
Why the truth when lies will do
Tit for tat in all of that
Assassination  nothing new

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unpretty ditty #16

slave of the camera
modern day chimera
part ego gone viral
web spinning tarantula
truth eating bacteria
nightmare in replica

political opera
overblown drama
corporate utopia
fascist with formula
racist pariah
nightly insomnia

history as oracle
questions rhetorical
national brand, sour pickle
promise lame, honor fickle
tortured truth in lieu of tickle
dams the vote to a trickle

debt to poverty, token sprinkle
feed the poor, pinch a nickel
spread paranoia, useful chemical
poisoned fear made endemical
democratic problematic
repudiates his own republic

language boorish and unbearable
nasty, horrible and incorrigible
parsecs past merely terrible
unhinged rage and hysterical
profane leader born chimerical
loss numerical, ’twas historical

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5-7-5-7-7 x 2

winners and losers
history, a glass half full
half gone, some half-truths
secrets forged, half on record
life goes on, breaks daily bread

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a cripple clopped by
struggles meanly up the street
sloppy in his pain
I forlorn rue my hist’ry
only lonely, whole and fleet

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5-7-5

curiosity
delves history’s mystery
love, men and women

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The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.
~Harry S Truman

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
~H L Mencken

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.
~L P Hartley

History gives answers only to those who know how to ask questions.
~Hajo Holborn

I believe that history is not made by cynics. It is made by realists who are not afraid to dream. Let us be these people.
~Tzipi Livni

History, as long as it continues to happen, is always another chance.
~R Jackson Wilson

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Quotes harvested from: https://azquotes.com, http://www.quotegarden.com
https://searchquotes.com, https://wiseoldsayings.com

Video Harvest:  https://vimeo.com, https://youtube.com

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