Quotes About History

Perhaps it is because novels are like affairs, and small novels - with fewer pages of plot to them - are affairs with less history, affairs that involved just a few glances across a dinner table or a single ride together, unspeaking, on a train, and therefore affairs are still electric with potential, still heart-quickening, even after the passage of all these years.

Yes, we have acquired a certain familiarity with the recent history of our surroundings, and that—in my humble opinion—allows us to put the present into much better perspective.

When the uncertain future becomes the past, the past in turn becomes uncertain

He preferred to abide, in a sense, in the past, for the past offered more to him.

We are all migrants through time. ELEVEN

How odd it would be to call Homer's Iliad or Rumi's Masnavi "the Great Eastern Mediterranean Poem.

Anders's pale father was the only pale person present, the only pale person left in the entire town, for there were by that point no others, and then his casket was closed and his burial was occurring and he was committed to the soil, the last white man, and after that, after him, there were none.

I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you—an American—will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.

I love it when you talk about where you come from," she said, slipping her arm through mine, "you become so alive.

Location, location, location, the realtors say. Geography is destiny, respond the historians. War

It is possible to read the history of this country as one long struggle to extend the liberties established in our Constitution to everyone in America.

Until June 26, 1918, all Texans could vote except "idiots, imbeciles, aliens, the insane and women.

Smithsonian magazine, July 2001, page 55.)

Because the story of your life never starts at the beginning. Don't they teach you anything in school?

We all need a story of where we came from and how we got here. Otherwise, how could we ever put down our tender roots and stay.

How many things were articles of faith to us yesterday that are fables to us today?

Philosophy is like science and unlike history in that it seeks general truths rather than an account of particular events, either in the near or distant past.

At various times in the history of education, a distinction has been made between learning through instruction and learning through discovery.

The first is: if you can, read more than one history of an event or period that interests you. The second is: read a history not only to learn what really happened at a particular time and place in the past, but also to learn the way men act in all times and places, especially now.

A good historian must combine the talents of the storyteller and the scientist. He must know what is likely to have happened as well as what some witnesses or writers said actually did happen.

Read biography as history and as the cause of history; take all autobiographies with a grain of salt; and never forget that you must not argue with a book until you fully understand what it is saying.

Chronos is the Greek word for time, topos

It is not surprising that the liberal arts were most assiduously cultivated in the Middle Ages than ever before or after. When theology is queen of the sciences, liberal education flourishes in her train.

For no matter how stern or cruel a regime, in the laboratory of history only rarely can state coercion be so powerful as to control fully the course of events. The depth and scope of spontaneous events that counter the wishes and expectations of a dictatorial government are not a lesser part of history than the deeds and misdeeds of the government and state.