Quotes About History

What we have to work with is hints and allegations, really, evidence, sometimes only a trace, that points to something lying behind the text. It's useful to keep in mind that any aspiring writer is probably also a hungry, aggressive reader and will have absorbed a tremendous amount of literary history and literary culture.

The study of God requires intellectual effort, historical imagination, empathic energy, and participation in a vital community of prayer (Augustine, Answer to Skeptics).

The early Christian historical memory was formed on three land masses -Asia, Africa and Europe. In this respect it does not differ from textually recorded human history, which formed in the conjunction between these three great spaces. Only three, not seven.

Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law.

And yet … Ireland, a little island at the edge of Europe that has known neither Renaissance nor Enlightenment—in some ways, a Third World country with, as John Betjeman claimed, a Stone Age culture—had one moment of unblemished glory.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they certainly are confident—and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

the Irish never troubled themselves overmuch about eradicating pagan influences, which they tended to wink at and enjoy. The pagan festivals continued to be celebrated, which is why we today can still celebrate the Irish feasts of May Day and Hallowe'en

Rule and Ruin: The Downfall of Moderation and the Destruction of the Republican Party, From Eisenhower to the Tea Party

The story of American history that most students have encountered for at least the past several decades amounts to a series of drearily predictable clichés: the Civil War was all about slavery, antitrust law saved us from wicked big business, Franklin Roosevelt got us out of the Depression, and so on. From the colonial settlements through the presidency of Bill Clinton, this book, in its brief compass, aims to set the record straight.

American presidents send a million Russians back to Stalin

Was U.S. entry into World War I such an act of genius that criticizing it is necessarily perverse?

The dollar has lost over 95 percent of its value since the Fed was created.

Father Nicholas Steno, is often identified as the father of geology.

The first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a free falling body was Father Giambattista Riccioli.

Jesuits so dominated the study of earthquakes that seismology became known as 'the Jesuit Science.

Western civilization's admiration for the written word and for the classics comes to us from the Catholic Church that preserved both through the barbarian invasions.

Persecutions of witches, erroneously associated with the Middle Ages, became widespread only during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

We learn from history that man can never learn anything from history.

To speak like a book I once read, wet weather is the narrative, and fine days are the episodes, of our country's history;

My argument is that War makes rattling good history; but Peace is poor reading.

Thus, neither having the clue to the other's secret, they were respectively puzzled at what each revealed, and awaited new knowledge of each other's character and moods without attempting to pry into each other's history.

I am now about to enter on my normal condition. For people are almost always in their graves. When we survey the long race of men, it is strange and still more strange to find that they are mainly dead men, who have scarcely ever been otherwise.

Had Philip's warlike son been intellectually so far ahead as to have attempted civilisation without bloodshed, he would have been twice the godlike hero that he seemed; but nobody would have heard of an Alexander.

it might have resulted far better for mankind if Greece had been the source of the religion of modern civilization, and not Palestine