Quotes About History

Property is an attempt to recover the past. It returns one to precompetitive status. One is compensated for the amount of time spent (and thus lost) in competition.

Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

Titles, then, point backward in time. They have their origin in an unrepeatable past.

Explanations settle issues, showing that matters must end as they have. Narratives raise issues, showing that matters do not end as they must but as they do. Explanation sets the need for further inquiry aside; narrative invites us to rethink what we thought we knew. If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

Power is concerned with what has already happened; strength with what has yet to happen.

If the silence of nature is the possibility of language, language is the possibility of history.

Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance.

Human freedom is not a freedom over nature; it is the freedom to be natural, that is, to answer to the spontaneity of nature with our own spontaneity. Though we are free to be natural, we are not free by nature; we are free by culture, by history.

The points of reference for all finite history are signal triumphs meant never to be forgotten: establishment of the throne of David, the birth of the Savior, the journey to Medina, the battle of Hastings, the American, French, Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions.

Historians become infinite speakers when they see that whatever begins in freedom cannot end in necessity.

Each person whose horizon is affected by the Renaissance affects the horizon of the Renaissance in turn.

Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun and not finished in the past.

in the 20th century, six times more people were killed by their own governments than were killed in wars.

the war was financed with a $200 million loan from the Rockefellers' National City Bank. How was the loan to be repaid? Since no income tax then existed, a telephone tax was levied on the American people. That tax remained in place for 108 years.

Money could never have originated as paper.

No doubt Confucius, as a person and as represented in the written tradition, is suffering an eclipse in Communist China because he is associated with those classes whose wealth is being proscribed as sops to bait the allegiance of the masses to the new political group. As students of history know, new political groups everywhere and throughout history have always proceeded thus.

History is not just the evolution of technology; it is the evolution of thought.

It is high time Americans grew accustomed to our traditions.

that and throughout the Civil War, this single building housed the entirety of the Smithsonian's collections. But where did this shining testament to science get its true start? Oddly enough, it wasn't an American who founded the institution

The old adage "necessity is the mother of all invention" remains as true today as it did back in 3500 B.C.

I am a collector of bread crumbs, all those bits of science and history that I mash and knead together to build my stories. And now that the bread is baked and served, my goal here is to try to separate those slices of the story that are based on substantial fact from those that are pure fabrication.

The woman with the horned helmet—who had to be of Viking descent—spoke.

And once Genghis Khan breached those walls, he did as he had promised. He killed everyone in the city, over a hundred thousand people. But he didn't stop there. It is said he slaughtered every beast of the field, too. It was those dark acts that earned the city the name it bears today." The professor shuddered. "Shahr-e-Gholghola. The City of Screams.

Museum of Jurassic Technology.