The History Guide

What follows are a series of quotations about history and the historian's craft. They have been culled from a variety of sources and they appear here in totally random order. Their purpose is to incite, energize and stimulate your historical imagination. * * *

"'History,' Stephen said, 'is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.'" James Joyce

"Since history has no properly scientific value, its only purpose is educative. And if historians neglect to educate the public, if they fail to interest it intelligently in the past, then all their historical learning is valueless except in so far as it educates themselves." G. M. Trevelyan.

"To each eye, perhaps, the outlines of a great civilization present a different picture. In the wide ocean upon which we venture, the possible ways and directions are many; and the same studies which have served for my work might easily, in other hands, not only receive a wholly different treatment and application, but lead to essentially different conclusions." Jacob Burckhardt

"History is the witness that testifies to the passing of time; it illuminates reality, vitalizes memory, provides guidance in daily life, and brings us tidings of antiquity." Cicero

"The past is useless. That explains why it is past." Wright Morris

"Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than a research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. Such facts may be detailed with the most minute exactness, and yet the narrative, taken as a whole, may be unmeaning or untrue. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time. He must study events in their bearings near and remote; in the character, habits, and manners of those who took part in them. He must himself be, as it were, a sharer or a spectator of the action he describes." Francis Parkman

"History . . . is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind." Edward Gibbon

"There is properly no history; only biography." Ralph Waldo Emerson

"What experience and history teach is this-that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." G. W. F. Hegel

"Everything must be recaptured and relocated in the general framework of history, so that despite the difficulties, the fundamental paradoxes and contradictions, we may respect the unity of history which is also the unity of life." Fernand Braudel

"The function off the historian is neither to love the past nor to emancipate himself from the past, but to master and understand it as the key to the understanding of the present." E. H. Carr

"If you do not like the past, change it." William L. Burton

"History does nothing, possesses no enormous wealth, fights no battles. It is rather man, the real, living man, who does everything, possesses, fights. It is not History, as if she were a person apart, who uses men as a means to work out her purposes, but history itself is nothing but the activity of men pursuing their purposes." Karl Marx

"An historian should yield himself to his subject, become immersed in the place and period of his choice, standing apart from it now and then for a fresh view." Samuel Eliot Morison

"History is for human self-knowledge. Knowing yourself means knowing, first, what it is to be a person; secondly, knowing what it is to be the kind of person you are; and thirdly, knowing what it is to be the person you are and nobody else is. Knowing yourself means knowing what you can do; and since nobody knows what they can do until they try, the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is." R. G. Collingwood

"History is more or less bunk." Henry Ford

"That historians should give their own country a break, I grant you; but not so as to state things contrary to fact. For there are plenty of mistakes made by writers out of ignorance, and which any man finds it difficult to avoid. But if we knowingly write what is false, whether for the sake of our country or our friends or just to be pleasant, what difference is there between us and hack writers? Readers should be very attentive to and critical of historians, and they in turn should be constantly on their guard." Polybius

"You have reckoned that history ought to judge the past and to instruct the contemporary world as to the future. The present attempt does not yield to that high office. It will merely tell how it really was." Leopold von Ranke

"Time in its irresistible and ceaseless flow carries along on its flood all created things and drowns them in the depths of obscurity. . . . But the tale of history forms a very strong bulwark against the stream of time, and checks in some measure its irresistible flow, so that, of all things done in it, as many as history has taken over it secures and binds together, and does not allow them to slip away into the abyss of oblivion." Anna Comnena

"Only a good-for-nothing is not interested in his past." Sigmund Freud

"Every past is worth condemning." Friedrich Nietzsche

"The historian does simply not come in to replenish the gaps of memory. He constantly challenges even those memories that have survived intact." Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi

"Each age tries to form its own conception of the past. Each age writes the history of the past anew with reference to the conditions uppermost in its own time." Frederick Jackson Turner

History is a jumble of events, proceedings, actions, dealings, occasion, occurrence, incident, affair, experience or something which is believed ever happened in the past. It could be divided into events which do not matter and events which probably never occurred. I see history as a whole of both facts and lies. That would not be a good blend but that what history is all about. Man creates history (his-story) and no one could deny it.

History is only a confused heap of facts. It is an argument without an end. The truth is covered by the untruth and the untruth is supposed to be covered by the truth. The study of history is actually the best medicine for a sick mind; as in history we have a record of the infinite variety of human experience plainly set out for all to see; and in that record we can find ourselves both examples and warnings; fine things to take as models, base things rotten through and through, to avoid. We may let history be one of the tools for each generation or each year to help get along in the world. Simply, take the good and throw away the evil.

Globalization has a very strong connection with New World Order. The New World Order is being established. It’s not less or more than a trap for every head in this world. I see this New World Order as a world domination with a purpose to master the minds of many. For advance description, the New World Order is a world government system which replaces national governments. The one world government is controlled globally by the U.N. Its main idea is to change the power bases of every nation with one power. For a system of One World Government to work, the control has to come from a single ruling power. Such a power need not be seen to be controlling. Incredibly, it is the way which happens today. People believe that they’re being ruled by their own government in co-operation with other governments throughout the world. We’re really into Power box, as it may be called. One nation who has less power tends to be conquered and controlled by other nation which has more power. It goes through stages where the more power nations will also be controlled by the nation which has the most power.

What I have mentioned about the world is being trapped is the establishment of obedience with no force. People have lost their sights and think differently. Their minds are being set away from their nature believe, so that they are away from their guidance and religion. The majority of people completely ignorant or they even might not know what’s happening. People are unaware of the fact that they become the puppets in the New World Order ‘drama’. The reason why people don’t rebel is because they only see good things in everything they do in their real life. The New World Order twists their minds. It’s like seeing good in evil. We’ve been trained to think in a particular way. For example promoting falseness and replacing the true with the false from time to time. The plan has actually been going on for a very long time. There’s nothing about the New World Order! Those who are involved in the new movement believe that with one World Government there will be a compulsory One World Religion which will be a mixture of all religions. That would be a completely disaster for the whole world in this universe. People will be lost for they don’t follow the ‘book’. It’s the AlKitab which is the guidance for every human’s life. The guidance is the rule, it is a measurement of good and bad, of what people should do or don’t. If they don’t follow what has been written in it, they would be lost track, left with no faith.

But that’s the purpose of the New World Order. It’s to make people lost so that they can be easily convinced or influenced. In Islamic view, I understand about Ghazwul fikri. Ghazwul fikri comes from Arabic words. The meaning is the War of Mind. Islam’s enemies fight and never let Islam believers be committed to Allah. They have certain ways to let the Muslims away from their religion. But it’s not in direct ways. They don’t make the Muslims change their religion but they make the Muslims change the way they think, the way they dress and the way they live their lives, so that they will have Muslims who don’t act as Muslims and Muslims who are beyond Islamic teachings.

I believe that the architecture has been used during the centuries by many dictators as a symbol meant to show to the entire world the power of their regimes and to reshape a style of life. After all that’s what the architecture should do. Should teach people how to live. Think about Germany: the architecture had an important role in defining the new order through Albert Speer’s work (I don’t accuse him). Stalin in Russia has used the architecture as a tool in redefining the shape of his New Order. Looking back in the history we will see many similar examples. The rise of a country will coincide with the birth of many architecture. So…if Bush wants to “show off” and to impress the rest of the world one of his best tools would be..yes..the architecture. Words can disappear, the movies can be faked but a feeling wrapped in a shell of steel and glass by an architect would never disappear, unless if you crash it by a plane. In this case I feel that architecture is being 'prostitued'. I simply don't agree.

As the conclusion, it’s better if we can think globally and act locally. I try to do things based on the real intention. The truth shall prevail, no matter how shameful it is. We have our guidance, so why don’t we let ourselves be guided by it?

References:
http://groups.msn.com/HouseoftheRastafarianNazarites/thefalsekingdom.msnw
http://irhakim.tblog.com/