Quotes About History

Scholars of economic history have worked up numbers suggesting that Britain spent more on maintaining its empire than it gained from exploiting it.

The Bourbon-Orléans family tree is infinitely larger, more ramified, and more intertangled than can possibly be shown here, largely owing to the longevity, fertility, and polygamy of Louis XIV.

Commemorating the Holocaust is not, not not not not not, the same thing as fighting to prevent future holocausts. Most of the commemorationists are just whiners. They think that if everyone feels bad about past holocausts, human nature will magically transform, and no one will want to commit genocide in the future.

After about three billion years of this sometimes zany, frequently tedious fugue of carnality and carnage

The world has actually been wired together by digital communications systems for a century and a half. Nothing that has happened during that time compares in its impact to the first exchange of messages between Queen Victoria and President Buchanan in 1858. That was so impressive that a mob of celebrants poured into the streets of New York and set fire to City Hall.

Introducing non-copy-protected software into this kind of an environment may be the single most boneheaded thing that American business has ever done in its long history of stepping on rakes in Asia.

But this is how history is done now. People wait until they have a need for some history and then they customize it to suit their purposes.

In most of the world, Magellan is thought of as the first guy who went around the world. Here, everyone knows he only made it as far as Mactan Island, where he was killed by Filipinos.

Almost as if it were written down somewhere in the Universal Character, Pepys and Wilkins and Waterhouse somehow knew that they had unfinished business together—that they ought to be having a discreet chat about Mr. Oldenburg. A triangular commerce in highly significant glances and eyebrow-raisings flourished there in the Dogg, for the next hour, among them.

Just like many Popish Plotters before them, these had promptly begun to "commit suicide" in the Tower. One had even managed the heroic feat of cutting his own throat all the way to the vertebrae!

The cathedral as a whole is awesome and stirring in spite, and possibly because, of the fact that we have no idea who built it. When we walk through it, we are communing not with individual stone carvers but with an entire culture.

Moral reforms and deteriorations are moved by large forces, and they are mostly caused by reactions from the habits of a preceding period. Backwards and forwards swings the great pendulum, and its alternations are not determined by a few distinguished folk clinging to the end of it. —Sir Charles Petrie, THE VICTORIANS

But our relationship to these infinite pasts and futures isn't random—plausibility throws its weight around, per some freaky quantum mechanics stuff that Dr. Oda calls Feynman Diagram History Pachinko.

had in mind a Dr. Waterhouse," Eliza said. "He was cut for the stone recently." The Marquis got the same aghast, cringing, yet fascinated look that all men did whenever the topic of lithotomy arose

Even the word 'science' comes from an Indo-European root meaning 'to cut' or 'to separate.' The same root led to the word 'shit,' which of course means to separate living flesh from nonliving waste. The same root gave us 'scythe' and 'scissors' and 'schism,' which have obvious connections to the concept of separation.

All of the history had been erased in Karen's earnest efforts to make the house historical.

chanson de geste

obviously Huguenots

They are probably now either archived or expunged. If I don't escape from 1851 within the next three weeks, I will never know which.

How can you be a Christian without believing in that?" "I would say," Juanita says, "how can you be a Christian with it? Anyone who takes the trouble to study the gospels can see that the bodily resurrection is a myth that was tacked onto the real story several years after the real histories were written. It's so National Enquirer-esque, don't you think?

For most of history those battles happen only every few centuries—you have the chariot, the compound bow, gunpowder, ironclad ships, and so on. But something happens around, say, the time that the Monitor, which the Northerners believe to be the only ironclad warship on earth, just happens to run into the Merrimack

In fact, I would probably sound like a seventeenth-century alchemist or something.

It was an ancient English church of that school of architecture known to scholars as A Big Pile of Rocks.

Neal Stephenson