Quotes About History

Epidemiologists generally agree that smallpox is the cruelest disease ever to afflict the human race.

Douglas Preston

I can scarcely believe the cruelty of the last century. It staggers the soul.

From the time of its independence in 1821 to the present, Honduras has suffered through a tumultuous history that includes close to 300 civil wars, rebellions, coups, and unplanned changes in government.

The New World was like a vast, tinder-dry forest waiting to burn—and Columbus brought the fire.

It had been presented by his great-grandfather to his great-grandmother on their wedding day. Interesting present, he thought to himself.

It was disease, more than anything else, that allowed the Spanish to establish the world's first imperio en el que nunca se pone el sol, the "empire on which the sun never sets," so called because it occupied a swath of territory so extensive that some of it was always in daylight.

Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infected blankets. And millions more Indians died of disease who might have survived, had European brutality not left them weakened and susceptible.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. 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 people of Honduras don't have a clear cultural identity. We have to start learning more about our past in order to create a brighter future.

Leishmaniasis has a long and terrible history with human beings, stretching back as far as human records exist and causing suffering and death for thousands of years.

Dr. Kelly, are you familiar with the term, 'cabinet of curiosities'?" Nora wondered at the man's ability to pile on non sequiturs. "Wasn't it a kind of natural history collection?" "Precisely. It was the precursor to the natural history museum. Many

Rather than rushing to tear things down during the architectural vandalism period of the 1950s and '60s, Savannah had preserved its link with the past, which in a personal way spoke to Constance and her own peculiar connection to distant times.

America. What a wonderful country. Too bad it was doomed to fail.

In his groundbreaking book Guns, Germs, and Steel, biologist Jared Diamond poses the question: Why did Old World diseases devastate the New World and not the other way around? Why did disease move in only one direction?* The answer lies in how the lives of Old World and New World people diverged after that cross-continental migration more than fifteen thousand years ago.

In 1680, the Indians rose up, killed four hundred settlers and dozens of padres, and drove the rest of the Spanish out of New Mexico. This was the Pueblo Revolt.

In those years, people will say, we lost track of the meaning of we, of you we found ourselves reduced to I and the whole thing became silly, ironic, terrible: we were trying to live a personal life and yes, that was the only life we could bear witness to But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged into our personal weather They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove along the shore, through the rags of fog where we stood, saying I

My country wedged fast in history stuck in the ice

That light of outrage is the light of history

What myth carries is not fact, not history, but truth—the ultimate reality. The Jesus story carries this ultimate reality, and that's why, two thousand years later, it remains so compelling.

myth carries is not fact, not history, but truth—the ultimate reality. The Jesus story carries this ultimate reality, and that's why, two thousand years later, it remains so compelling.

Forbear harping on what was of yore, for it is the common lot of mortals to sustain the ups and downs of fortune.

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunters.

Until lions have their historians, tales of the hunt shall always glorify the hunter.