Quotes About History

A crowd that has just watched a rather humdrum game experiences far less life affirmation than a crowd that believes it has just missed the most dramatic event in sporting history.

History is never altered you see, it just fits together like a jigsaw. Funny old thing, life, isn't it?

we haven't even finished burying the artificial dinosaur skeletons in the crust yet.

The first thing they saw on leaving the elevator was a long concrete wall with over fifty doors in it offering lavatory facilities for all of fifty major life forms. Nevertheless, like every parking lot in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of parking lots, this parking lot smelled predominantly of impatience.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe is one of the most extraordinary ventures in the entire history of catering. It has been built on the fragmented remains of…it will be built on the fragmented…that is to say it will have been built by this time, and indeed has been—

Nevertheless, like every parking lot in the Galaxy throughout the entire history of parking lots, this parking lot smelled predominantly of impatience

When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years.

The history of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure and enormously long lunch-breaks.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call The Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

tyrants always set about shaping history after their liking.

The archbishop of St. Andrews threatened that if Knox preached, he would be shot on sight. Knox preached anyway, from Perth to Fife and beyond. As a result, the summer of 1559 saw an extraordinary revival spread throughout Scotland.59

Hitler's commitment to the V-2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades. Though Hitler had no expressed interest in reaching the moon, the uncomfortable fact is that the darkest shafts and foulest backwater of human savagery helped bring this loftiest of human dreams to reality.

At least there's nothing scary about him and hopefully he doesn't see anything scary in me. We go way back, to summer camp. We KNOW each other. People I don't know just make me want to say YIKES! I'll take history over mystery any day of the week.

You see, when you're middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you. You have to live with the fact that history can never champion your causes and that history will never feel sorry for you. It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile; all sadnesses go unpitied.

The past is a finite resource.

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience.

I once read that for every person currently alive on earth, there are nineteen dead people who have lived before us. That's not that much really. Our existence as a species on earth has been so short. We forget that.

1959* 100th McDonald's: Fon du Lac, Wisconsin

Grasping Armstrong by the throat came ultimately from R. B. Rutledge, though shaking him was Black's idea, and shaking him like a "rag" was Herndon and Weik's.

One might say that modern Honduran history began in 1873, when Jules Verne introduced Americans to the banana in his novel Around the World in 80 Days, where he praised it as being "as healthy as bread and as succulent as cream.

While dead men tell no tales, their corpses often speak volumes.

People need history in order to know themselves

No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.

The ultimate offense was the idea that Europeans "discovered" the New World to begin with, as if the people living here didn't exist before Europeans saw them.