Quotes About History

If we read history with an open mind, we cannot fail to conclude that, among all the military virtues, the energetic conduct of war has always contributed most to glory and success.

history had no lessons or rules to offer the student, it could only broaden his understanding and strengthen his critical judgment.

When Europeans colonized Africa, they helped trigger giant epidemics by forcing people to stay and work in tsetse-infested places. In 1906, Winston Churchill, who was the colonial undersecretary at the time, told the House of Commons that one sleeping sickness epidemic had reduced the population of Uganda from 6.5 million to 2.5 million.

Since hominin skin doesn't fossilize, we can't say for sure what skin color our ancestors had four million years ago. But if our closest living primate relatives—gorillas and chimpanzees—are any guide, they likely had light skin.

There is thus more Neanderthal DNA on Earth today than when Neanderthals existed.

Our own lineage split off from that of chimpanzees roughly seven million years ago.

Over the past three thousand years, smallpox may have killed more people than any other disease on Earth.

Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they would have accidentally introduced little variations to their craft. Over a few thousand years, those mismatches would have caused the hand ax to drift far away from its original shape.

Between 1400 and 1800, smallpox killed an estimated five hundred million people every century in Europe alone.

To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn't get to have children. And by "they," Goddard mostly meant women.

The story of the Kallikaks, Goddard concluded, was a powerful argument for rounding up the feebleminded and putting them in colonies, at least until a better solution could be found.

Today's Europeans are fairly uniform, genetically speaking. But that uniformity came out of a biological blender.

Thirteen thousand years ago it fell to Antarctica. It rested in the Allan Hills as the Ice Age glaciers retreated, farmers discovered agriculture, cities rose, and rockets shot into space.

In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had died during surgery or due to an accidental overdose of sedatives.

Most Americans don't know that in the 1800s, malaria's range swept all the way up the Great Plains into North Dakota, or that in 1901, a fifth of the population of Staten Island carried the parasite.

There's no such thing as dead languages, only dormant minds.

Poetry is written with tears, fiction with blood, and history with invisible ink.

Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened

We seem to live in a world where forgetting and oblivion are an industry in themselves and very, very few people are remotely interested or aware of their own recent history, much less their neighbors'. I tend to think we are what we remember, what we know. The less we remember, the less we know about ourselves, the less we are. (Interview with Three Monkeys Online, October 2008)

Nothing feeds forgetfulness better than war.... We all keep quiet and they try to convince us that what we've seen, what we've done, what we've learned about ourselves and about others, is an illusion, a passing nightmare. Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, until the moment comes when we no longer recognize them and they return, with another face and another name, to devour what they left behind.

The cinema began as an invention for entertaining the illiterate masses. Fifty years on, it's much the same.

Te sorprendería cómo uno siempre busca en el presente o en el futuro las respuestas que están en el pasado.

A young man is the perfect soldier. He has great potential for aggression and a limited critical capacity—or none at all—with which to analyze it and judge how to channel it. Throughout history societies have found ways of using this store of aggression, turning their adolescents into soldiers, cannon fodder with which to conquer their neighbors or defend themselves against their aggressors.

Ignatius B. Samson, welcome to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books.