Quotes About History

It's sad," said Lucile, thinking of all the girls whose youth was passing them by in vain: the men were gone, prisoners or dead. The enemy took their place. It was deplorable, but no one would even know in the future. It would be one of those things posterity would never find out, or would refuse to see out of a sense of shame.

The people around him believed that fate was tracking them down, them and their pitiable generation; but not Maurice: he knew there had been exoduses throughout history. How many people had died on this land (on land everywhere in the world), dripping with blood, fleeing the enemy, leaving cities in flames, clutching their children to their hearts: no one gave a thought to these countless dead, or pitied them.

philosophers have warned us: if we forget the past, we are doomed to repeat

Wszystko, o czym mówisz, wszystko, o czym myÅ›lisz, byÅ'o ju? kiedyÅ› powiedziane i pomyÅ›lane. I wprowadzone w czyn. KilkanaÅ›cie razy.

Because the Arabic-Muslim accounts of the Prophet and early Islamic history are based on later materials, some scholars reasoned that the only way to know the true history is to use non-Muslim sources. One result was an account of the origin of Islam as a messianic Jewish sect in Palestine and North Arabia that much later was redefined as a new religion. In general, however, this effort has failed, because the non-Muslim sources are themselves fragmentary, poorly informed, and prejudiced.

Battle of Ajnadayn

So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of "bestial machinery." Yet the Rape of Nanking remains an obscure incident. Unlike the atomic explosions in Japan or the Jewish holocaust in Europe, the horrors of the massacre at Nanking remain virtually unknown to people outside Asia. The massacre remains neglected in most of the historical literature published in the United States.

Back in 1943, Prince Mikasa Takahito, the youngest brother of Emperor Hirohito, spent a year as a staff officer at the Nanking headquarters of the Japanese Imperial Army's expeditionary force in China, where he heard a young officer speak of using Chinese prisoners for live bayonet practice in order to train new recruits. "It helps them acquire guts," the officer told the prince.

You seem to think the past is unreal, a pit full of ghosts. But to me the past is in some ways the most real thing of all, and loyalty to it the most important thing of all.

Our planet is a freak which we shall destroy by our own wicked senseless activities in the next century. Our history will very soon come to an end. Now that God is dead, we are at last presented with the truth, yes, the truth remains, but it is on a short lead. Anyway, we are nothing and it matters not what we do.

He's had a bloody awful childhood. Like I had. Those things get passed on and on.

I am just a past with no present.

God lives and works in history. The outward mythology changes, the inward truth remains the same.

But people have their own troubles and tend to forget. One is not all that interesting. Even Hitler is being forgotten at last.

The past is gone, it doesn't exist any more.

Things which he and she had done and been in years past were having their deep inevitable consequences.

He looked like some unidentified person in a nineteenth-century photograph.

History repeated itself. The 'don't do the things I did' mantra was tiresome pish. The best way to make sure your children don't grow up as cunts is not to be one yourself - or not to let them SEE you being one. This is easier as a sober artist in Santa Barbara than as an alcoholic jailbird in Leith.

1926. The General Strike in Leith. You read all that and what they said then and you pure see what the Labour Party used to believe in - freedom for the ordinary cat.

Na?i ?e se drugi papa, ali nikad više ne?e biti Boti?elija.

All the hundreds of millions of people who, in their time, believed the Earth was flat never succeeded in unrounding it by an inch.

There are no happy endings in history, only crisis points that pass.

The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more.

Past glories are poor feeding.