Quotes About History

There are heroes and, emphatically, heroines enough in this history. Yielding to the temptation to focus on their courage, however, may miss the point. Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people.

Zero was the solution to the problem. By around 300 BC the Babylonians had started using two slanted wedges, , to represent an empty space, an empty column on the abacus. This placeholder mark made it easy to tell which position a symbol was in.

if history is any guide, a long, long road lies ahead before physicists will be able to tame fusion reactions

Simple! On the very first day that I started working at the museum, I asked a scientist the very same question. He told me that the skeleton was sixty-five million years old. That was thirty-eight years ago.

A powerful glamour has engulfed the United States of America. It's not the first time, of course—that nation is a shining temple to amnesia with its foundations built atop the bones of vanished empires

Edinburgh has history the way cats have bad breath.

The empire of the Pharaohs was old before Rome was a twinkling in Odysseus's eye, wise before China had been discovered, and over and done with before our founding fathers came down from Mount Olympus to give us the Bible and the US Constitution—

Twelve percent of all the photographs ever taken in human history have been taken in the last twelve months. And 40 percent of them are on Facebook.

History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator

Yet how did they know to preserve their dead for thousands of years without cryonic suspension? And how did they build their giant pyramids, made out of stone blocks bigger and heavier than shipping containers, quarried from mountains hundreds of miles from the Valley of the Kings?" Obviously, Mary noted, empires that endured for thousands of years couldn't possibly have achieved anything notable without the helpful guidance of interstellar white saviors—

outrageously accurate simulations of long-dead lives, annealed until their written corpus matches that inherited from the presingularity era in the form of chicken scratchings on mashed tree pulp

History is a foreign country, and the old are unwilling emigrants, tired out by the constant travel.

For as long as there have been creditors and debtors—which is a darn long time—creditors have tried to protect the value of the currency and debtors have sought to devalue it.

Shandy. Have you begun your Ptolemaic

Scions of old families who've hit the skids do like to flaunt their illustrious ancestors....

Political correctness is just tyranny with manners. I wish for you the courage to be unpopular. Popularity is history's pocket change. Courage is history's true currency.

By the way he reacted, you would have thought I told him that slavery never happened. He laid into me with the same gusto as a right-wing political pundit on the O'Reilly Factor defending President Bush's right to vacation six days out of the week.

It is the storyteller who makes us what we are, who creates history. The storyteller creates the memory that the survivors must have - otherwise their surviving would have no meaning.

People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.

Every generation must recognize and embrace the task it is peculiarly designed by history and by providence to perform.

Ogbuef Ezedudu,who was the oldest man in the village, was telling two other men when they came to visit him that the punishment for breaking the Peace of Ani had become very mild in their clan. It has not always been so, he said. My father told me that he had been told that in the past a man who broke the peace was dragged on the ground through the village until he died. but after a while this custom was stopped because it spoiled the peace which it was meant to preserve.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

I would be quite satisfied if my novels (especially the ones I set in the past) did no more than teach my readers that their past - with all its imperfections - was not one long night of savagery from which the first Europeans acting on God's behalf delivered them

Its body was carved with men and pythons and little steps were cut on one side; without these the drummer could not climb to the top to beat it. When the Ikolo was beaten for war it was decorated with skulls won in past wars. But now it sang of peace.