Quotes About History

When I see a picture like the 1861 cotton market, I ask myself, "What caused that? Why did that happen?" Then I try to figure it out. From that, you learn an enormous amount. In

I saw my father's wooden filing cabinet, his framed diplomas stacked on top of it, just as they'd been brought from his office. In that cabinet lay records of the colds, cut fingers, cancers, broken bones, mumps, diphtheria, births and deaths of a large part of Mill Valley for over two generations. Half the patients listed in those files were dead now, the wounds and tissue my father had treated only dust.

It seems to me that it's usually impossible to get hold of another time. You look at a pair of high-button shoes, the leather dry and cracked, buttons missing, the cloth uppers nearly drained of color by the years, and it just isn't possible to get into the mind of some long-gone woman who once saw them new. How could they ever have been new and shining, something a woman might actually covet?

The notion of representing a sound by a graphic symbol is itself so stupefying a leap of the imagination that what is remarkable is not so much that it happened relatively late in human history, but that it happened at all.

I tried to bring up boyfriends and sex. Her great dark eyes surveyed me with emptiness and a kind of chagrin that reached back generations and generations in her blood from not having done what was crying to be done--whatever it was, and everybody knows what it was.

history becomes fiction in the…act of being written down

Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?" Day mumbled something that sounded like "Ancient History of the Near East and Greece." "Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork, "Come with me and see the Near East.

history is best explained dramatically, because for God's sake nobody's going to tell me that massive Homeric war so to speak, between the Achaens and the Iliums was caused merely by some economic factor concerning trade...

Then Indiana fields again, and St. Louis as ever in its great valley clouds of afternoon. The muddy cobbles and the Montana logs, the broken steamboats, the ancient signs, the grass and the ropes by the river. The endless poem.

Buddhism wasn't responsible for the insane atrocities of human history

It was one of the worst winters in Texas and Western history, when cattle perished like flies in great blizzards and snow fell on San Francisco and LA.

For when destruction comes to the world of "history" and the Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before, people will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico as well as from the caves of Bali, where it all began and where Adam was suckled and taught to know. These were my growing thoughts as I drove the car into the hot, sunbaked town of Gregoria.

The human race is doomed to sink back farther and farther into the primitive night ere again it begins its bloody climb upward to civilization.

woe of unnumbered generations

We will grind you revolutionists down under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the dirt since history began, and I read history aright. And in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine and those that come after us have the power. There is the word. It is the king of words—Power. Not God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your tongue till it tingles with it. Power.

Strength is an empty shell. One cannot violate the promptings of one's nature without having that nature recoil upon itself. Show me a man with a tattoo, and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

A business man who was also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approximately, the right thing to do for humanity. But, outside the realm of business, these men are stupid. They know only business. They do not know mankind nor society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of the fates of the hungry millions and all the other millions thrown in. History, some day, will have an excruciating laugh at their expense. I was not surprised when I had my

If only I were articulate to paint in the frail medium of words what I see and know and possess incorporated in my consciousness of the mighty driftage of the races in the times before our present written history began!

Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the evolution of society.

San Francisco is gone. Nothing remains of it but memories.

That the work of a drinker who had no intention of stopping drinking should become a major propaganda piece in the campaign for Prohibition is surely one of the ironies in the history of alcohol.

I went to my first dinosaur hall with my father and twin brother. We went to the American Museum of Natural History, and I was blown away by the dinosaurs.

When 'Legacies' picked up, we never really saw the history between both of the twins.

Your brain develops depending on your individual history. What has gone on in your own brain and its consciousness over your lifetime is not repeatable, ever - not with identical twins, not even with conjoined twins.