The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

David Lowery

I write about the period 1933-42, and I read books written during those years: books by foreign correspondents of the time, histories of the time written contemporaneously or just afterwards, autobiographies and biographies of people who were there, present-day histories of the period, and novels written during those times.

Alan Furst

War Time Years

Histories are more full of examples of the fidelity of dogs than of friends.

Alexander Pope

Than T Stories

American histories were the same; they had these mad ideas about how Parliament worked, or what people really meant when they said A, B, or C. All my life, I felt simultaneously deracinated and rooted in both places, and now it's my greatest strength: I'm culturally bilingual.

Amanda Foreman

Work Strength Men

Does the entry of Indian H-1B worker augur a change in the relations of production in the world of cybertechnology? No, but the presence of such workers - their skills and their histories - introduce contradictions into the system that are not always easily absorbed or dissolved.

Amitava Kumar

Work Technology Change

Watching soccer is my main hobby, really. I'm no tactician or coach, but I enjoy watching the free flow of it, the different styles, and the histories behind clubs. Like Barcelona vs. Madrid - it's not just a soccer game; it's a geopolitical struggle. There are great storylines and no commercials.

Andrew Luck

Great Watching Watch

In the 1970s, as historians became enchanted with microhistories, economists were expanding the reach of their discipline. Nations, states and cities began to plan for the future by consulting with economists whose prognostications were shaped by investment cycles rather than historical ones.

Annalee Newitz

Men Future Wit

There is a lot of learned material written about nationalism - scholarly books and papers, histories of it, theories of it - but most of us understand that nationalism, at its heart, at its very deepest roots, is about a feeling of superiority: We are better than you. Our country is better than your country.

Anne Applebaum

Art Your You

Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.

Anthea Butler

Women Men Art

In the Iraq war, for instance, so much of the information is digitized and can easily be wiped out. That will make it very hard to write accurate histories. Also, there's a much greater opportunity for suppression of information before it can even be archived.

Antony Beevor

War Great Write

There is no question that creative intelligence comes not through learning things you find in books or histories that have already been written, but by focusing on and giving value to experience as it happens.

Antony Gormley

Learning Intelligence Experience

Free nations with different histories, economies and a vast amount of stubborn pride will never achieve complete agreement, even when they desire the same objectives.

Arthur Hays Sulzberger

Men Wit Will

Nixon is fascinating because he's our most alienated president. Everybody felt that they never knew who he was - that's palpable in the histories. His face is so cartoony that he's become this cartoon figure. I never really related to the romanticization of J.F.K., and I knew too much about Reagan to idealize him. Nixon falls in between.

Austin Grossman

Romantic Car Art

I'm trying to deal with ideas about histories, fame, hearsay, and how public identities are constructed.

Barbara Kruger

Yin Wit Trying

The history of Germany is not the history of a nation, but of a race. It has little unity, therefore; it is complicated, broken, and attached on all sides to the histories of other countries.

Bayard Taylor

History Unity Unit

Whether in cave paintings or the latest uses of the Internet, human beings have always told their histories and truths through parable and fable. We are inveterate storytellers.

Beeban Kidron

Truth Whether Ways

I mainly read histories and biographies, but I'm also a big fan of Graham Swift and Thomas Hardy.

Ben Elliot

Thomas T Swift

It's the classic thing - children's TV gets watched by everybody, not just children. 'Horrible Histories' is the sort of thing everyone watches.

Ben Miller

Watches Watched Watch

I don't plan to write another science book, but I don't plan not to. I do enjoy writing histories, and taking subjects that are generally dull and trying to make them interesting.

Bill Bryson

Science Yin Writing

Currently, many job seekers must check a box on their applications indicating whether they have a criminal history. These boxes are often used as proxies for job fitness, and job-seekers with criminal histories frequently find themselves screened out of contention. As a matter of basic fairness and also economic sense, it's time to ban the box.

Bob Casey, Jr.

Time History Fitness

People want chat histories. They're a permanent testimony of a relationship.

Brian Acton

Relationship Want Tim

Having read the histories of other countries, I saw that expansion was everything, and that the world's surface being limited, the great object of present humanity should be to take as much of the world as it possibly could.

Cecil Rhodes

In the late 1990s, I left the teaching field to write biographies and histories for young adults.

Charles J. Shields

The international community lies at the center of the Obama foreign policy. Unfortunately, it is a fiction. There is no such thing. Different countries have different histories, geographies, necessities, and interests. There's no natural, inherent, or enduring international community.

Charles Krauthammer

Society mends its wounds. And that's invariably true in all the tragedies, in the comedies as well. And certainly in the histories.

Charlton Heston

When I begin a book, I inevitably discover many things along the way, about the characters, their past histories and the political intrigues that surround them. This discovery process is vital, and I would not prejudice it by deciding too much in advance.

David Brin

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.

David Levering Lewis

The idea that all we have is everything that's come before us, and we are the accumulated weight of our own personal histories, is a beautiful concept. And yet it also leaves you asking, 'Is that all there is? Is that all that defines us? Is that all we have?'

David Lowery

The great untruth around which everything pivots is the idea that the defenders of these statues are the defenders of history and truth; while those who want to see them toppled or contextualised are the Huns at the gate, who would destroy national histories and bring down great men.

David Olusoga

Since I began presenting programmes about black history my life has become a constant impromptu focus group. I am stopped in the street by people who want to talk about the histories those documentaries explore.

David Olusoga

My time as editor has been overlapped by a crisis - a prolonged, labyrinthine, tragic, seemingly non-ending crisis - that involves the prehistory of 9/11, 9/11, Iraq, Afghanistan, fraught histories between the United States and almost everyone.

David Remnick

A compassionate heart will lift you out of the pain and suffering of your own world because it knows that everyone is doing the best they can, given their state of consciousness and the histories they're dragging behind them.

Debbie Ford

Before Charlottesville, it might have been easy to dismiss the plot of 'Mudbound' as no longer relevant. Now, I feel like audiences will be more receptive to the material - and to interrogating their personal histories after watching it.

Dee Rees

If I can go three grandmothers back and find a slave, that means someone else can go three grandmothers back and find a slave owner. When you interrogate your histories, it forces you to rethink who you are and where you are.

Dee Rees

Each moment is defined by a multitude of histories, the past constantly converging upon us, perpetually decaying and reforming itself on the steady pulse of now, now, now, now.

Dee Rees

Sometimes what we call tragedy, at least in the theater, are really case histories. They're based on the central figure, and things happen to that person, and they're called tragedy because they're extremely sad. But tragedy always has a glorious thing happen at the end of it. That's what the catharsis is.

Derek Walcott

If there is an abiding theme in 'The Pursuit of Happiness,' it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories.

Douglas Kennedy

Cities and towns throughout central and northwest Connecticut have strong industrial histories and are now in the process of transitioning into new sources of economic growth. I'm doing what I can to be a strong partner in these efforts.

Elizabeth Esty

I started reading the big histories and the small histories, the memoirs and so forth. At some point, I found the diary of William E. Dodd.

Erik Larson

I find diplomatic histories the dullest of histories.

Erik Larson

I don't chart out the life histories of the people I play. If I did, I'd be in trouble. I work with my heart and my head, and naturally emotions follow.

Ernest Borgnine

As befits Silicon Valley, 'big data' is mostly big hype, but there is one possibility with genuine potential: that it might one day bring loans - and credit histories - to millions of people who currently lack access to them.

Evgeny Morozov

Computer scientists have built a set of massive DNS databases, which provide fragmentary histories of communications flows, in part to create an archive of malware: a kind of catalog of the tricks bad actors have tried to pull, which often involve masquerading as legitimate actors.

Franklin Foer

A Republic without parties is a complete anomaly. The histories of all popular governments show absurd is the idea of their attempting to exist without parties.

Franklin Pierce

Histories are to educate so that we understand better for ourselves and for motivation.

Gael Garcia Bernal

Most critical histories of U.S. involvement in Iran rightly began with the joint British-U.S. coup against democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953, which installed Pahlavi on the Peacock Throne. But it was Kissinger who, in 1972, greatly deepened the relationship between Washington and Tehran.

Greg Grandin

Although combat operations unseated the Taliban and the Saddam Hussein regime, a poor understanding of the recent histories of the Afghan and Iraqi peoples undermined efforts to consolidate early battlefield gains into lasting security.

H. R. McMaster

I applied for funding to embark on an overseas field trip in Iceland, and spent six weeks there happily holed up in the national archives, museums and libraries, sifting through ministerial and parish records, censuses, maps, microfilm, logs, and local histories.

Hannah Kent

Future peace, prosperity and confidence depend not just on ourselves but on the success of all nations. Hence, we are all partners, no matter what our backgrounds, cultures, faiths and histories.

Hassanal Bolkiah

Recounting their histories, people often sound like interested bystanders to their own lives.

Hugh Mackay

As independent filmmakers, we are actually deeply dependent on each other. The Spirit Awards are a public expression of those bonds, the intricate set of relationships and histories that we filmmakers depend on to make our most personal work.

Ira Sachs