Quotes About History

A. N. Wilson in Jesus and Robin Lane Fox in The Unauthorized Version (among

EÄŸer bilim tarihi bize tek bir ÅŸey gösteriyorsa, o da cehaletimize 'Tanr?' etiketini yap??t?rarak bir yere ulaÅŸamad???m?zd?r.

I have yet to see any good reason to suppose that theology (as opposed to biblical history, literature, etc.) is a subject at all.

A branch of one of the cranial nerves, the recurrent laryngeal runs from the brain to the larynx. It doesn't go straight there, however. Instead, it dives down into the chest, loops around one of the main arteries leaving the heart, and proceeds back up the neck to the larynx. In a giraffe the detour is significant (British understatement) and it is presumably costly. The explanation lies in history, in the nerve's emergence in our fish ancestors before a discernible neck evolved.

Could it have been the drawing of maps that boosted our ancestors beyond the critical threshold which the other apes just failed to cross?

The most terrible wars of history, the two major wars of the century, have nothing to do with religions.

Only human beings guide their behaviour by a knowledge of what happened before they were born and a preconception of what may happen after they are dead; thus only humans find their way by a light that illuminates more than the patch of ground they stand on. P. B. and J. S. MEDAWAR, The Life Science (1977)

How can we know whether the course of a life would have been changed by some particular alteration in its early history?

MOST OF THE NATIONS OF the Middle East can be divided into those with long histories and no oil, and those that have lots of oil and very little history. With a few notable exceptions, both groups share a common feature: they were cobbled together by outsiders. The borders of the modern Middle East were drawn by Europeans after the First World War with no regard for the interests or backgrounds of the people who inhabited it.

Everything changed with the First World War. The Middle East was reorganized, redefined, and the seeds were planted for a century of bloodshed.

The Crusades, waged intermittently from 1095 to 1291, but which continued in waves for centuries after that, were military campaigns sanctioned principally by the Roman Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land. American students barely learn about the Crusades, but they are essential to understanding the wars of the last decade.

Because in the end history—like the Berlin Wall—shapes people, had shaped her, but would not in the end determine her, because in the end it cannot account for the great irrational—the great human—forces: the destructive power of evil, the redeeming power of love.

to judge us all through the machine of the Commandant's monstrous fictions! As though they were the truth! As though history & the written word were friends, rather than adversaries!

He understood that he shared certain features, habits and history with the war hero. But he was not him. He'd just had more success at living than at dying

The Line welcomed rain and sun. Seeds germinated in mass graves, between skulls and femurs and broken pick handles, tendrils rose up alongside dog spikes and clavicles, thrust around teak sleepers and tibias, scapulas, vertebrae, fibulas and femurs.

The inescapable lesson of history is that any power given to the state – even when well meaning in intent – will ultimately be abused by the state. Like freedom, non-freedom does not arrive ready-made. It grows, and no soil should ever be made ready for its sowing.

Richard Flanagan

What do the hieroglyphs tell us of what it was like to live under the lash, building the pyramids? Do we talk of that? Do we? No, we talk of the magnificence and majesty of the Egyptians. Of the Romans. Of Saint Petersburg, and nothing of the bones of the hundred thousand slaves that it is built on.

railway fettler, and his family lived in a Tasmanian Government Railways

Fincher was the kind of Southerner who will try to address you through a web of deep and antic southernness, and who assumes every body in earshot knows all about his parents and history and wants to hear an update about them at every opportunity. He looks young, but still manages to act 65.

I was born into an ordinary, modern existence in 1945, an only child to decent parents of no irregular point of view, no particular sense of their place in history's continuum, just two people afloat on the world and expectant like most others in time, without a daunting conviction about their own consequence.

In Natchez, you only use the word home if it's antebellum," said Doug. "If your house was built after the Civil War, it's trashy to call it a home.

It's just the South. There's no point trying to explain it.

No state has a more beautiful name—Miss and Sis are sipping on something sippy, and it's probably a sweet tea or an iced bourbon drink—but no state is more synonymous in the rest of the country with racism, ignorance, and cultural backwardness.