Quotes About History

I believe that history has shape, order, and meaning that exceptional men, as much as economic forces, produce change and that passe abstractions like beauty, nobility, and greatness have a shifting but continuing validity.

Our liberal, New York/Washington-based media would never in a million years put Liberal Godfather Ted Kennedy on the spot about his clan's bad behavior, to whose lurid history he himself has contributed so much.

My generation of bossy, confident, baby-boom women were something brand new in history. Our energy and assertiveness weren't created by Betty Friedan, unknown before her 1963 book, or by Gloria Steinem, whose political activism, as even the Lifetime profile admitted, did not begin until 1969.

American policy seems to be wed to a perpetual state of war. Why? History shows that the world will always be in flux or turmoil, with different peoples competing for visibility and power. The U.S. cannot fix the fate of every nation.

The Earth is littered with the ruins of empires that believed they were eternal.

We are all telling the same story. When writing about race, there can perhaps be precious little wholly fresh revelation. As with writing about motherhood. It has been the same story for as long as anyone can remember.

La historia tiene ya el número de páginas suficientes para enseñarnos dos cosas: que jamás los poderosos coincidieron con los mejores, y que jamás la política (contra todas las apariencias) fue tejida por los políticos (meros canalizadores de la inercia histórica).

The past is a sadly inadequate word for what we've been through

Words provide a voice to our deepest feelings. I tell you, words have started and stopped wars. Words have built and lost fortunes. Words have saved and taken lives. Words have won and lost great kingdoms.

Years ago women of my size were considered royalty.

We may just be specters in this world, but our stories, if they are remembered and retold, become real and solid and alive.

Can anybody point me to that one time in history where the side that was demanding censorship, segregation, propaganda, radical education, papers to move freely in society, plus government forces going door to door to demand compliance were the good guys?

To be the queen of an ancient kingdom, even the abdicated queen, apparently counts for nothing in the universal scheme of things.

Even the editor of the highly respected Medical Record found more to fear than to admire in Lister's theory. "Judging the future by the past," he wrote, "we are likely to be as much ridiculed in the next century for our blind belief in the power of unseen germs, as our forefathers were for their faith in the influence of spirits, of certain planets and the like, inducing certain maladies.

Science would soon exceed even Bell's expectations. Had Garfield had been shot just 15 years later, the bullet in his back would have been found by X-ray images and the wound treated with antiseptic surgery. He might have been back on his feet within weeks. Had he been able to receive modern medical care, he likely would have spent no more than a few nights in the hospital.

Theologians in all ages have looked out admiringly upon the material universe and … demonstrated the power, wisdom, and goodness of God; but we know of no one who has demonstrated the same attributes from the history of the human race.

There are times in the history of men and nations, when they stand so near the veil that separates mortals and immortals, time from eternity, and men from their God, that they can almost hear their breathings and feel the pulsations of the heart of the infinite. JAMES A. GARFIELD

In fact, Secret Service agents would not be officially assigned to protect the president until after William McKinley was shot in Buffalo, New York, on September 6, 1901. The day McKinley was shot—he would die from his wounds eight days later—Robert Todd Lincoln was once again standing with the president, thus earning the dubious distinction of being the only man to be present at three of our nation's four presidential assassinations.

The past informs the present. Memory makes the map we carry, no matter how hard we try to erase it.

A single word has sometimes lost or won an empire...

Had Luther and Calvin been confined before they had begun to dogmatize, the states would have been spared many troubles.

En sólo unos pocos años, cuando todo lo que perdurara de mí en esta tierra no fuera más que recuerdo y polvo, del monasterio no habría de quedar piedra sobre piedra.

Si las mujeres de esta familia no hubieran sido tan estúpidas y los hombres tan ambiciosos, se habrían ahorrado años de dolor.

Para los más jóvenes aquel apellido sonoro y agudo que oían pronunciar de vez en cuando estaba vagamente ligado a la leyenda de aquellos parajes, a sus historias más antiguas, ciertas o no, y a algunas personas muertas mucho tiempo atrás que antes de abandonar este mundo se encargaron de dejar bien grabado su nombre en la memoria colectiva.