Quotes About History

Just one example were the European slaves brought to the coast of North Africa by pirates. These European slaves were more numerous than the African slaves brought to the United States and to the American colonies from which it was formed. But the politicization of history has shrunk the public perception of slavery to whatever is most expedient for promoting politically correct agendas today.

To suggest that "society" can simply "arrange" better outcomes somehow, without specifying the processes, the costs or the risks, is to ignore the tragic history of the twentieth century, written in the blood of millions, killed in peacetime by their own governments that were given extraordinary powers in the name of lofty goals.

By 1709, the Irish owned only 14 percent of the land in their own

For thousands of years, imperial conquests have been launched by Asians, Africans, and indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere, as well as by Europeans.

is hard to imagine anything more conducive to unending internal strife and a weakening of the bonds that hold a society together. The tragic history of territorial irredentism offers little reason for optimism about moral irredentism.

In Winston Churchill's words: We owe London to Rome.34

In history a great volume is unrolled for our instruction, drawing the materials of future wisdom from the past errors and infirmities of mankind. It may, in the perversion, serve for a magazine, furnishing offensive and defensive weapons…and supplying the means of keeping alive, or reviving, dissensions and animosities, and adding fuel to civil fury.38

should also be noted that the Constitution's distinction in counting people for representation in Congress was between slave and free, not black and white. Free blacks were counted the same as whites—and free blacks existed before the Constitution existed.

not one private bank was opened in Dublin in the quarter century before 1793.

The low and precarious economic conditions of the nineteenth-century Irish were reflected in their living conditions—perhaps the worst of any racial or ethnic group in American history.

Slaves were among the main commodities traded during this era, which preceded the era of European territorial conquests in sub-Saharan Africa.

You have to know history to appreciate the absurdity of what is called the 'medical model', because it's simply absurd.

Regardless of approach, the past holds something valuable for all of us. It is literally the root of who we are, physically through our actual ancestors and culturally in establishing the foundations for our current beliefs and practices in religious, social, domestic, and political arenas. The same ancients that we study were themselves drawn to their own pasts, often asking questions similar to the ones we pose today about our past.

Every moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.

Finally, only thirty or forty million years before, our earliest ancestors had crawled out of the primeval slime; and then, no doubt, finding the change unpleasant, crawled back in again.

We are critical of the priests who burned the paper books of the Aztecs because contemporary Europe looked down upon the non-Christian Americans and wanted to destroy their heathen beliefs. But we ourselves have so little esteem for these same beliefs that although the most important ones were recorded by the early Spaniards, we reject them as the fables of primitive nations.

For every minute, the future is becoming the past.

People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way – even when these stories concern their own native countries.

People are inclined to accept all stories of ancient times in an uncritical way -even when those stories concern their own native counties...Most people, in fact, will not take trouble in finding out the truth, but are more inclined to accept the first story they hear.

The people made their recollections fit in with their sufferings

It will be enough for me, however, if these words of mine are judged useful by those who want to understand clearly the events which happened in the past and which (human nature being what it is) will, at some time or other and in much the same ways, be repeated in the future. My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.

Events of future history will be of the same nature - or nearly so - as the history of the past, so long as men are men.

The absence of romance in my history will, I fear, detract somewhat from its interest; but if it be judged useful by those inquirers who desire an exact knowledge of the past as an aid to the understanding of the future, which in the course of human things must resemble if it does not reflect it, I shall be content. In fine, I have written my work, not as an essay which is to win the applause of the moment, but as a possession for all time.