Quotes About History

Don't you see? It's Galaxy-wide. It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration - a stagnation!

The age of the pulp magazine was the last in which youngsters, to get their primitive material, were forced to be literate.

Encyclopedias don't win wars.

In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.

We mythologists know very well that myths and legends contain borrowings, moral lessons, nature cycles, and a hundred other distorting influences, and we labor to cut them away and get to what might be a kernel of truth. In fact, these same techniques must be applied to the most sober histories, for no one writes the clear and apparent truth—if such a thing can even be said to exist.

History was interesting to the extent that it was catastrophic and, while that might make absorbing viewing, it made horrible living.

Of such things, petty annoyance and aimless thrusts, is history made.

I wouldn't want [the people of Baleyworld] to live that long as a general thing. The pace of historical and intellectual advance would then become too slow. Those at the top would stay in power too long. Baleyworld would sink into conversation and decay - as your world has done.

Pierre Curie, a brilliant scientist, happened to marry a still more brilliant one—Marie, the famous Madame Curie—and is the only great scientist in history who is consistently identified as the husband of someone else.

Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.

Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.

There's no record in the history of the Galaxy of any society being so foolish as to use nuclear explosions as a weapon of war.

They (Medievalists) are soft, dreamy people who find life too hard for them here and get lost in an ideal world of the past that never really existed.

Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all. Yet we won by the inevitability of history.

John Dalton's records, carefully preserved for a century, were destroyed during the World War II bombing of Manchester. It is not only the living who are killed in war.

It's a worship of the past. It's a deterioration—a stagnation!

There was something ghost-like and insubstantial about gases to these early chemists. They called liquids that turned into gases easily, spirits. Methyl alcohol, they called wood spirit; ethyl alcohol, wine spirit. Even today, alcoholic beverages are frequently referred to as spirits. (Modern Arabs, from whose language the word alcohol was taken, call ethyl alcohol spirit from the English. This is a queer exchange.)

And after the Fall will come inevitable barbarism

Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.

Nowadays, of course, we are taught that the flat-Earth theory is wrong; that it is all wrong, absolutely. But it isn't. The curvature of the Earth is nearly 0 per mile, so that although the flat-Earth theory is wrong, it happens to be nearly right. That's why the theory lasted so long.

The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

Every atom in me has a long history during which it may have been part of many living things, including human beings, and during which it may also have spent long periods as part of the sea, or in a lump of coal, or in a rock, or as a portion of the wind blowing upon us.

frequent phenomenon in history: the republic whose ruler has every attribute of the absolute monarch but the name. It therefore enjoyed the usual despotism unrestrained even by those two moderating influences in the legitimate monarchies: regal "honor" and court etiquette.

Los seguidores del Viejo de la Montaña fueron llamados hashishin («fumadores de hachís»). Para los europeos, este nombre se convirtió en la voz «asesinos».