Quotes About History

We ought not to look back unless it is to derive useful lessons from past errors, and for the purpose of profiting by dear-brought experience.

Much of late modernity assumes that dependence on God is a mark of human immaturity and an obstacle to human freedom. The life of Karol Wojty?a and his accomplishment as Pope John Paul II suggest a dramatic, alternative possibility: that a man who has been seized and transformed by the "more excellent way" can bend the curve of history so that freedom's cause is advanced.

Poland was a reminder to the world that there is more to history and power than brute force; the human spirit can bend the course of history in nobler directions. Culture drives history, over the long haul.

religious conviction, and the truths Christianity teaches about the inalienable dignity of every human life, can be a dynamic, creative force, bending history in a more human direction.

the crisis of the modern world was first of all a crisis of ideas, a crisis in the very idea of the human person. History was driven by culture and the ideas that formed cultures. Ideas had consequences. And if the idea of the human person that dominated a culture was flawed, one of two things would happen. Either that culture would give birth to destructive aspirations, or it would be incapable of realizing its fondest hopes, even if it expressed them in the most nobly humanistic terms.

The Berlin Wall is the defining achievement of socialism.

The gap between ideals and actualities, between dreams and achievements, the gap that can spur strong men to increased exertions, but can break the spirit of others -- this gap is the most conspicuous, continuous land mark in American history. It is conspicuous and continuous not because Americans achieve little, but because they dream grandly. The gap is a standing reproach to Americans; but it marks them off as a special and singularly admirable community among the world's peoples.

Author complains about "the further submergence of irrecoverable history into a perpetually churned present.

This makes an American 80-year-old's finishing sprint especially fun, because it can be focused on this fact: To live a long life braided with the life of a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to an imperishable proposition is simply delightful.

World War II was the last government program that really worked.

Tous les dictateurs, à toutes les époques de l'Histoire, ont invoqué la justice sociale, c'est toujours au nom de l'égalité qu'on a étranglé la Liberté, il ne peut y avoir d'égalité que sous un maître absolu.

America is the only nation in history which, miraculously, has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.

Why has not anyone seen that fossils alone gave birth to a theory about the formation of the earth, that without them, no one would have ever dreamed that there were successive epochs in the formation of the globe.

My object will be, first, to show by what connections the history of the fossil bones of land animals is linked to the theory of the earth and why they have a particular importance in this respect.

We must know how to look into images to see that of which they are survivors. So that history, liberated from the pure past (that absolute, that abstraction), might help us to open the present of time.

Es el hombre vivo lo que hay que buscar bajo el polvo de los archivos y en el silencio de los museos.

We are constantly producing the past. We are factories for the past. Living past-making machines, what else? We eat time and produce the past. Even death doesn't put a stop to this. A person might be gone, but his past remains.

You can't make a museum to preserve something that has never left.

The past grows like a weed.

Sometimes we don't stop to think how some historical event only appears to be more distant than it actually is. When I was born, the Second World War was a mere twenty-three years in the past, but it has always seemed like a completely different epoch to me.

At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created. Tomorow was September 1

The history of the family can be described through the abandonment of several children. The history of the world, too.

My great-grandfather was in the army in India, and we have photographs of my family there in full Victorian dress. They're incredibly romantic.

There are certain moments in the history of a nation when the choices made define the decades to come.