Quotes About History

El embrión no queda afectado, y sirve como indicio de la pasada condición de las especies. Por eso sucede que las especies existentes, durante los primeros períodos de su desarrollo, se parecen a menudo a formas antiguas y extinguidas

Il me serait difficile de rappeler au lecteur qui n'est pas familier avec la géologie les faits au moyen desquels on arrive à se faire une vague et faible idée de l'immensité de la durée des âges écoulés.

There is nothing like geology; the pleasure of the first day's partridge shooting or first day's hunting cannot be compared to finding a fine group of fossil bones, which tell their story of former times with almost a living tongue. Charles Darwin, letter to his sister Catherine, 1834

It is very true what you say about the higher races of men, when high enough, replacing and clearing off the lower races. In 500 years how the Anglo-Saxon race will have spread and exterminated whole nations; and in consequence how much the Human race, viewed as a unit, will have risen in rank.

It is fortunate that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.

Regrets are idle; yet history is one long regret. Everything might have turned out so differently!

Even on the worst days, details of her old life seemed like a museum exhibition, artifacts to study and understand in historical context.

All I can say is that we are mistaken to gouge such a deep rift in history that the things old men and old women know have become so useless as to be not worth passing on to grandchildren.

Old Point Comfort was where the first Africans were set ashore from a Dutch ship in 1619.

If you mean slaves, you only remember what they allowed you to remember. Even if Davis Bend was really as humane as you believe, they kept their misery to themselves, kept it a mystery to you. I promise that's true. Think of it as a great gift, a mark of affection. Their protection of your memory.

History reveals a person's deeds—their outward character but not themselves. There is a secret self that has its own life rounded by a dream—unpenetrated, unguessed.

Her need to shape memory into history.

History in the making, at least on the personal level, is almost exclusively pathetic. People suffer and die in ignorance and delusion.

Inhuman, V says. But that's an easy word. We've been doing that sort of thing to each other all through history, back past the Pyramids. Humans are inhuman, whether it's by direct action or by acceptance of a horrible action as normal.

Their moral position in converting from slave holders to champions of freedom was about like a house cat on a cold night scooting through a closing door just before the latch clacks shut. But sometimes timing is all. A brief moment of history, less than a deep breath, becomes the difference between inside and outside.

He liked brown antiquated travel books describing trips that weren't possible anymore - explorations of the Western Hemisphere back when much of it was still unmapped.

In her heart, though, she wondered, Is anything remembered forever?

You can mire yourself in the past, but you can't change a damn thing in that lost world.

smile not, reader, for those were days in which men believed in the devil);

where the Coffins had lived ever since Noah's flood (if, indeed, they had not merely returned thither after that temporary displacement)

What," asked Julian without preamble, "did Trelawny snatch from the funeral pyre at Viareggio?" The go-between replied, "Shelley's heart.

Wherever Mohammedanism has taken root, it has led at first to rapid and enthusiastic outbursts of vigor, but it seems gradually to sap the energy of the nations which adopt it, and leads, after a

when brought into contact with the empire, picked up all the vices of its decaying civilisation without losing those of his original barbarism. It is not without some reason that the doings of Gaiseric have left their mark on the history of language in the shape of the modern word ' Vandalism.

Most of us still believe to-day, that [history] is not merely concerned with the stringing together of facts in their correct order and the reconstruction of annals, but with something more. We must draw the moral . . . [W]e yet hold that history has its lessons, and that they can be discovered and taught. 'The experience of the past', as Stubbs wrote, 'can be carried into the present: study gives us maxims as well as dry facts.