Quotes About History

The fact that four centuries had neither proved it to be founded on a mistake, inspired any hatred of its purpose, nor given rise to any reaction that had battered it down, invested this simple grey effort of old minds with a repose, if not a grandeur, which a too curious reflection was apt to disturb in its ecclesiastical and military compeers.

And the d'Urberville knights and dames slept on in their tombs unknowing.

The greater the sinner the greater the saint; it was not necessary to dive far into Christian history to discover that

The club of Marlott alone lived to uphold the local Cerealia. It had walked for hundreds of years, if not as benefit-club, as votive sisterhood of some sort; and it walked still.

The best fiction is truer than history

Marriage is only an accident of situation, situation an accident of history, and history of geography.

The point in Yalbury Wood which abutted on the end of Geoffrey Day's premises was closed with an ancient tree, horizontally of enormous extent ,though having no great pretensions to height. Many hundreds of birds had been born amidst the boughs of this single tree: tribes of rabbits and hares had nibbled at it's bark from year to year; quaint tufts of fungi had sprung from the cavities of it's forks; and countless families of moles and earthworms had crept about its roots.

Marriage is only an accident of situation, situation an accident of history, history of geography.

In reprinting this story for a new edition I am reminded that it was in the chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd" as they appeared month by month in a popular magazine, that I first ventured to adopt the word "Wessex" from the pages of early English history, and give it a fictitious significance as the existing name of the district once included in that extinct kingdom.

Shiloh isn't haunted – men are haunted. Shiloh doesn't care.

To write a novel, you begin with what you can see and then you add what came before and what came after. ...You must understand that when you are writing a novel you are not making anything up. It's all there and you just have to find it.

History warns us that it is the customary fate of new truths to begin as heresies and to end as superstitions.

But anyone who is practically acquainted with scientific work is aware that those who refuse to go beyond fact, rarely get as far as fact; and anyone who has studied the history of science knows that almost every great step therein has been made by the 'anticipation of Nature,' that is, by the invention of hypotheses, which, though verifiable, often had very little foundation to start with.

Those who are ignorant of Geology, find no difficulty in believing that the world was made as it is; and the shepherd, untutored in history, sees no reason to regard the green mounds which indicate the site of a Roman camp, as aught but part and parcel of the primeval hill-side.

The occurrence of successive forms of life upon our globe is an historical fact, which cannot be disputed; and the relation of these successive forms, as stages of evolution of the same type, is established in various cases.

There can be no doubt that the existing Fauna and Flora is but the last term of a long series of equally numerous contemporary species, which have succeeded one another, by the slow and gradual substitution of species for species, in the vast interval of time which has elapsed between the deposition of the earliest fossiliferous strata and the present day.

The Papacy is not other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof.

But when I think of how many there are to whose designs it will be advantageous that these principles should be false, when I see that those who maintain contrary doctrines are not corrected, even though they have been punished by a civil war, when I see that the best minds are nourished by the seditious doctrines of the ancient Greeks and Romans, I fear that this writing of mine will be numbered with Plato's Republic, More's Utopia, Bacon's New Atlantis, and similar amusements of the mind.

È proprio vero che il Poeta, o il Filosofo, o l'Artista il cui genio è la gloria della sua epoca, viene ad essere diminuito per il fatto che senza dubbio è storicamente probabile, per non dire certo, che egli è il diretto discendente di qualche selvaggio nudo e bestiale, la cui intelligenza appena bastava a farlo un po' più furbo della volpe, e per ciò stesso molto più pericoloso della tigre?

The perpetual demonization of the South and Southerners is part and parcel of the Lincoln myth. The continued demonization of everything Southern is part of the gatekeepers' strategy to keep the public from ever becoming curious about alternative interpretations of nineteenth-century history.

I like the dreams of the future better than the history of the past.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. { Letter to celebrated scientist Alexander von Humboldt , 6 December, 1813 }

The dead should not rule the living.

On every question of construction (of the Constitution) let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit of the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.