Quotes About History

Green sods are all their monuments; and yet it tells A nobler history than pillared piles, Or the eternal pyramids.

Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Vengeful conquerors burn books as if the enemy's souls reside there, too.

With words we begin to leave traces behind us like breadcrumbs: memories in symbols for others to follow. Ants deploy their pheromones, trails of chemical information; Theseus unwound Ariadne's thread. Now people leave paper trails.

Of course he has a knife, he always has a knife, we all have knives! It's 1183 and we're barbarians!

The history of psychiatry rewrites itself so often that it almost resembles the self-serving chronicles of a totalitarian and slightly paranoid regime.

Love is what you've been through with somebody.

This national energy policy of the last four decades is, in my view, the greatest dereliction of civic responsibility in the history of the Republic. And it is worse today than ever.

There was an age, however, when the transition from savagery to civilization, with all its impressive outward manifestations in art and architecture, took place for the first time.

In any case, in so far as our knowledge of the universe carries us, the advent of civilization for the first time on our globe represents the highest ascent of the life processes to which evolution had anywhere attained.

In the "lynching era," between 1880 to 1940, white Christians lynched nearly five thousand black men and women in a manner with obvious echoes of the Roman crucifixion of Jesus. Yet these "Christians" did not see the irony or contradiction in their actions.

And certainly the history of the black-white relations in this country from the Civil War to the present unmistakably shows that as a people, America has never intended for blacks to be free. To this day, in the eyes of most white Americans, the black man remains subhuman.

Unlike Europeans who immigrated to this land to escape from tyranny, Africans came in chains to serve a nation of tyrants.

Klan women and men saw themselves not as bigoted extremists but as good Christians and good patriots joining proudly in a moral crusade.

Out of the 65 million men mobilised between 1914 and 1918 by the Allies and the Central Powers combined, it is now generally estimated that some 9 million were killed outright and 21 million wounded. Even allowing for the first-ever air war's restricted dimensions, the toll it took of flying men was minuscule compared to that of the trenches.

The truth that no abrupt change has ever taken place in all the customs of a people, and that it cannot, in the nature of things, take place, is perhaps the most fundamental lesson that history teaches.

Woe to our time, for the study of letters has perished from among us.

In the history of the treatment of depression, there was the dunking stool, purging of the bowels of black bile, hoses, attempts to shock the patient. All of these represent hatred or aggression towards what depression represents in the patient.

Anno domini—that's the most fatal complaint of all in the end.

For Chips, like some old sea captain, still measured time by the signals of the past. . . .

There was nothing like it before in history: a machine that promised liberation from the daily bondage of place. And in a free country like the United States, with the unrestricted right to travel, a vast geographical territory to spread out into, and a national tradition of picking up and moving whenever life became intolerable, the automobile came as a blessing.

What if people come and take all the books away and melt them like they did to the motorcars?' 'Books don't melt.

Few moderns may think of the linear development of human history in the same terms the old Christians used, but the modern world of ideas is unimaginable without the irreversible linearity of connection and direction they provided. Everyone on the planet recognizes the Christian scheme of marking and pointing time's arrow, even when we noncommittally mark our dates BCE/ CE.

search of traces of the ancient past—and fine dark chocolate.