Quotes About History

People try to pigeonhole comics by saying they're just for kids. So is The Odyssey. So is the Labors of Hercules, the story of Fa Mulan. The advantage of those stories over the contemporary ones is that they've had 2,000 years of editing. All the crap has been weeded out over time.

Usually, historical revelations come from days of legwork, ploughing through piles of letters and papers in archives or even private homes, looking for the telling phrase or letter that someone else has missed.

No golfer's journey is complete without a pilgrimage to St. Andrews, the mecca of the game. This is where it all began, back in the 15th and 16th centuries.

If you look at the beginning of this country, when the pilgrims came to this country, the first year they had a communistic experiment. They said, 'OK, we're going to take the land, we're going to work the land together and share in the fruits of our labor.' They almost starved to death. Almost half of them died that first year.

My mother had an illegal abortion in 1960, which was the year the birth control pill came out, but I guess a little late for her, but - and I never knew. I found out when my father, after her death, got her FBI file.

I'm a huge sci-fi geek, and I also really get into all of the alien shows on the History Channel where you see air force pilots talking about UFOs - I love that stuff.

Without sounding like a New Age crystal worshipper, you can feel something there, in these old dilapidated colonial farms and hidden graveyards in the middle of a pine forest. I certainly did as a kid.

The point of that is, if you look at Walgreen's history, they've always been pioneers in the application of technology. They're the only drugstore chain that I know to have their own satellite.

China has all the advantages in the world. But it doesn't have a history of free thinking, risk-taking pioneers - the kind of people the U.S. is built upon.

It wasn't fun to go to school, because we had to wear these blue things around our necks. We had to join the Pioneer Society, and we had to salute with our hands over our eyes. Even then, I was thinking for myself. I thought this wasn't so different from the way the Nazis had conditioned people.

I'm saying that there were many great naturalists before Darwin's time who were very pious people and who knew more about nature than most of us. These were great naturalists; people I would admire for their knowledge of natural science given the time.

Blackbeard is probably the most infamous pirate who ever lived. He's one of those characters for which most of your work is done before you start.

Pirates almost never sailed with women. Just four or five are known to have worked as pirates during the Golden Age. Two of them - Mary Read and Anne Bonny - became famous, dressing as men and fighting alongside one of the most celebrated of all pirate captains, 'Calico' Jack Rackham.

Once you discover that real pirates are more interesting than fictional ones, you can't look away.

I remember when the Berlin Wall fell and suddenly intractable problems get solved.

I went in, and there, in the front room, a converted bedroom, sat the first radio I had ever seen. The equipment was so bulky that it took up one entire wall of the bedroom. The set, which could send or receive signals, was tuned to KDKA in Pittsburgh, and I remember being completely flabbergasted at the thought of sounds coming from that box.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

It was great to see the Berlin Wall come down.

In Peter Ackroyd's book 'London: The Biography,' he describes the route of the medieval wall that enclosed the original city. Take the book and follow it from the Tower of London via the Barbican to Ludgate Hill. You experience the real history of London.

Roman history was kind of unavoidable where I was growing up. It was everywhere - all the place names and ruins and forts. My dad's a history buff, and I spent a lot of time on Hadrian's Wall. I became fascinated by the idea of what was so terrifying up there that the Romans built a 60-mile long, 30ft high stone wall to keep it out?

1989 was such a very, very important year in Europe. The wall fell, the Soviet Union was crumbling, and so many things happened - in 15 minutes, the world changed.

For me, the fall of the Wall came at the exact right time because, I mean, I was 17, basically I hadn't missed anything, unlike the generation of my parents, who were deprived of a lot of things. They couldn't travel, and they couldn't really get ahead in their professional careers. So for me, it was perfect timing.

I would love to go to the Last Supper and become a fly on the wall to hear what was said and see what went on.

I was in Germany when the wall came down.