Quotes About History

Since every nation tends to believe that each of its past wars was fought in self-defence, a drawn war is more likely to be remembered as a victory.

The birth of a nation called for many fathers, none of whom could be pre-eminent, and when Parkes died the federation was only a balloon floating beckoningly in the air.

Looking back on Rome's success, it is all too easy to conclude that its victories were preordained. It is almost as if Rome arose with consummate certainty from the seven hills, gaining such a height that seemingly it could not be challenged. But in almost every phase of Rome's history there were crises

Christianity has both spurred and retarded the sciences and social sciences. Indeed, most of the modern debates of profound significance were originally dialogues with or within Christianity.

the song and dance musical comedies that prevailed in the 1920s and '30s and the integrated musicals that became more influential in the 1940s and '50s both allow a meaningful dramatic relationship between songs and their shows.

AS A NATION-STATE, Vietnam is younger than the United States. The S-shaped region we now know as Vietnam—stretching more than a thousand miles from China's southern border to the Ca Mau Peninsula in the Gulf of Thailand—was not effectively united under a single ruler until 1802. In that year, a general who called himself Gia Long emerged from thirty years of civil war and established the Nguyen dynasty.

For out of olde feldes, as men seyth,Cometh al this newe corn fro yer to yere;And out of olde bokes, in good feyth,Cometh al this newe science that men lere.

But the Troian gestes, as they felle,In Omer, or in Dares, or in Dite,Whoso that kan may rede hem as they write.

Geoffrey Chaucer

By God, if women had written stories, As clerks had within here oratories, They would have written of men more wickedness Than all the mark of Adam may redress.

Recall the cold Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn, Wakefield, Tewkesbury : fastidious trumpets Shrilling into the ruck ; some trampled Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind's Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.

Scattered among these things are reminders that sound once existed: a metronome, a drumming pad, a guitar pick, a trumpet mouthpiece, a music stand, a tuning fork, a block of rosin...The older instruments bear the marks of those who have already played them, the scuffs and bites and dents that are the mysterious scars of sound. In their midst the house hangs, tenuous and enveloping, a sounding board waiting to be struck.

More than 80 per cent of all combat during the Second World War took place on the Eastern Front.

The Germans dropped tens of thousands of tons of bombs on Stalingrad but most explosions contributed little more than reconfiguration of existing rubble.

earliest examples are dated to the first century

Prussians were singularly well prepared in other areas as well. They invented the "dog tag" in 1870: an oval disc worn by every soldier bearing his name, regiment, and place of residence.

Churchill that he had a great many military ideas, most of them likewise bad.

he had died as late as the New Year of 1939, he would, as Paul Addison says, 'perhaps be remembered today as the most illustrious and interesting failure in twentieth-century British politics'. Certainly until his apotheosis he was more often seen as an 'interesting failure' than as the subject for a study in greatness.

Although Churchill hadn't been the only sponsor of the doomed Gallipoli enterprise, he had played a leading role, and not even an honest one at times. In any case, the old saying goes that success has many parents but failure is an orphan, and Gallipoli had become a one-parent child.

When Curzon was rash enough to say that 'all civilisation has been the work of aristocracies', Churchill retorted, 'The upkeep of aristocracies has been the hard work of all civilisations

In sharp contradiction to Kipling, Mark Twain had no wish to succeed the British in any imperial role. He abhorred what his country had done to the people of the Philippines as much as what the British had done to the Boers, and so he finished introducing his English guest with the playfully reproachful words: 'We are kin. And now that we are kin in sin, there is nothing more to be desired.

History started badly and hav been getting steadily worse.

The Greeks possessed a knowledge of human nature we seem hardly able to attain to without passing through the strengthening hibernation of a new barbarism.

Perhaps in time the so-called Dark Ages will be thought of as including our own.