Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, saint, helena, british, east, india and/or company:
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Ce corps qui s’appelait et qui s’appelle encore le saint empire romain n’était en aucune manière ni saint, ni romain, ni empire. This agglomeration which called itself and still calls itself the Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)
“Her name was called Lady Helena Herring and her age was 25 and she mated well with the earl.”
—Daisy Ashford (1881–1972)
“Gaze not on swans, in whose soft breast,
A full-hatched beauty seems to nest
Nor snow, which falling from the sky
Hovers in its virginity.”
—Henry Noel, British poet, and William Strode, British poet. Beauty Extolled (attributed to Noel and to Strode)
“Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.”
—Philip Guedalla (1889–1944)
“India is an abstraction.... India is no more a political personality than Europe. India is a geographical term. It is no more a united nation than the Equator.”
—Winston Churchill (1874–1965)
“... we may remember what the Romans ... thought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)