Quotes About History

The lights are going out all over Europe; We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime. —SIR EDWARD GREY, ON WORLD WAR I

How could any woman know her own story until she knew her mother's?

Es wäre lächerliche und ungerechtfertigte Selbstüberhebung, wenn wir annehmen wollten, wir seien energischer oder intelligenter als das Altertum - unser Wissensstoff hat zugenommen, nicht aber die Intelligenz. Darum sind wir neuen Ideen gegenüber gerade so borniert und unfähig wie die Menschen in den dunklesten Zeiten des Altertums. An Wissen sind wir reich geworden, nicht aber an Weisheit.

For all my respect for history, it seems to me that no insight into the past and no re-experiencing of pathogenic reminiscences – however powerful it may be – is as effective in freeing man from the grip of the past as the construction of something new…no matter what the original circumstances from which they arose, [the neurosis] is conditioned and maintained by a wrong attitude which is present all the time and which, once it is recognized, must be corrected now.

The expansionary dynamic of Western culture has been the root, the denominating constant, of modern history. The grandeur of Western liberalism, its material abundance, the flourishing of its arts and sciences, its painful construction of constitutional democracy -- these interconnected achievements have been financed by the sustained theft called imperialism.

I believe that individuals nowadays are probably more aware of their inner loneliness than has ever been true before in history.

The answer to the problem of evil does not lie in trying to establish its point of origin, for that is simply not revealed to us. Rather, in the moment of the cross, it becomes clear that evil is utterly subverted for good.... If God can take the greatest of evils and turn them for the greatest of goods, then how much more can he take the lesser evils which litter human history, from individual tragedies to international disasters, and turn them to his good purpose as well.

In his 1983 Templeton Prize address, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn offered this summary explanation for why all the horrors of Soviet communism came to pass: "Men have forgotten God; that's why all this has happened."1

In biblical times or in ancient Greece, sex was regarded as something that human beings did; today it is considered to be something vital to who human beings are.

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It is simply too painful to acknowledge -- even to ourselves -- that we've been so credulous. (So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new bamboozles rise.)

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.Shovel them under and let me work—I am the grass; I cover all.

When Abraham Lincoln was shoveled into the tombs, he forgot the copperheads and the assassin… in the dust, in the cool tombs.

History is a living horse laughing at a wooden horse. History is a wind blowing where it listeth. History is no sure thing to bet on. History is a box of tricks with a lost key. History is a labyrinth of doors with sliding panels, a book of ciphers with the code in a cave of the Saragossa sea. History says, if it pleases, Excuse me, I beg your pardon, it will never happen again if I can help it.

When a nation goes down, or a society perishes, one condition may always be found; they forgot where they came from. They lost sight of what had brought them along.

An historical truth is only true once

The library is the temple of learning, and learning has liberated more people than all the wars in the history.

1) War becomes a completely isolated act, which arises suddenly, and is in no way connected with the previous history of the combatant States. (2) If it is limited to a single solution, or to several simultaneous solutions. (3) If it contains within itself the solution perfect and complete, free from any reaction upon it, through a calculation beforehand of the political situation which will follow from it.

The stubborn inequalities in the Unites States are not the result of some people living in a physical environment. Their environment is built by social forces, and those forces last for centuries because they are regenerated across the generations.

The Europeans unwittingly brought a biological weapon with them that gave the invaders a brutal advantage over their opponents. With no immunity whatsoever to smallpox, Native Americans died in droves when they were exposed to the virus. In Central America, over 90 percent of the native population is believed to have died of smallpox in the decades following the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores in the early 1500s.

You always get paid in cash. It's Rule One. If I'd been around to advise the Indians, do you think I'd have let them take beads for Manhattan? Hell, no.

Gli storici, scrisse Aristotele (Poetica, 51 b) parlano di quello che è stato (del vero), i poeti parlano di quello che avrebbe potuto essere (del possibile). Ma naturalmente il vero è un punto d'arrivo, non un punto di partenza. Gli storici (e, in modo diverso, i poeti) fanno per mestiere qualcosa che è parte della vita di tutti: districare l'intreccio di vero, falso, finto che è la trama del nostro stare al mondo.

The future has an ancient heart.