Quotes About History

Drawing on the best modern scholarship, this book seeks to rescue the history of networks from the clutches of the conspiracy theorists, and to show that historical change often can and should be understood in terms of precisely such network-based challenges to hierarchical orders

News of the Indian Mutiny had taken forty-six days to reach London in 1857, travelling at an effective speed of 3.8 miles an hour. News of the huge Nobi earthquake in Japan in 1891 took a single day, travelling at 246 miles an hour, sixty-five times faster.50

Banknotes (which originated in seventh-century China) are pieces of paper which have next to no intrinsic worth. They are simply promises to pay (hence their original Western designation as 'promissory notes')

Sivilisaation ydin ovat tekstit, jotka sen kouluissa opetetaan, jotka sen oppilaat oppivat ja jotka muistetaan koettelemusten aikana.

young people at Western schools and universities have been given the idea of a liberal education, without the substance of historical knowledge. They have been taught isolated 'modules', not narratives, much less chronologies. They have been trained in the formulaic analysis of document excerpts, not in the key skill of reading widely and fast.

the dichotomy between network and hierarchy is an ancient idea.

One difficulty is that we cannot always reconstruct the past thoughts of these non-Western peoples, for not all of them existed in civilizations with the means of recording and preserving thought. In the end, history is primarily the study of civilizations, because without written records the historian is thrown back on spearheads and pot fragments, from which much less can be inferred. The

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity — and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.

Sería más acertado hablar de «nihilismo islámico», o quizá «bolchevismo islámico», pues no debemos olvidar que en sus primeros años Lenin y Stalin fueron también terroristas. En

From the point of view of most African-Americans, American independence postponed emancipation by at least a generation.

lo más sorprendente del 11 de septiembre es que no hubiera ocurrido antes. Estados Unidos llevaba años subvencionando a Israel. Había sostenido al régimen del sha en Irán. Había desplegado tropas en Arabia. No había pocos motivos para un atentado perpetrado por uno u otro de los grupos terroristas de Oriente Próximo.

It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as 'der Weltkrieg', the world war; the British preferred the 'European War' or, later, the 'Great War'.

The English were luckier in their drugs, too: long habituated to alcohol, they were roused from inebriation in the seventeenth century by American tobacco, Arabic coffee and Chinese tea. They got the stimulation of the coffee house, part café, part stock exchange, part chat-room;47 the Chinese ended up with the lethargy of the opium den, their pipes filled by none other than the British East India Company.

European sense. No one can predict how it will end because there is no precedent for it.

The question was simply this: Would the world be French or British?

From 1500, anyone in China found building a ship with more than two masts was liable to the death penalty; in 1551 it became a crime even to go to sea in such a ship.21 The records of Zheng He's journeys were destroyed. Zheng He himself died and was almost certainly buried at sea. What

as inflation has fallen, so bonds have rallied in what has been one of the great bond bull markets of modern history. Even more remarkably, despite the spectacular Argentine default - not to mention Russia's in 1998 - the spreads on emerging market bonds have trended steadily downwards, reaching lows in early 2007 that had not been seen since before the First World War, implying an almost unshakeable confidence in the economic future.

No tenemos ningún interés en Sudamérica; no sentimos ninguna simpatía políticamente fundamentada hacia ellos. Venimos de orígenes distintos... Ni todos los tratados que pudiéramos hacer, ni los comisionados que pudiéramos enviar, ni el dinero que pudiéramos prestarles, transformarían a sus Bolívares... en Washingtons'. —Edward Everett

What became known in Russia as 'pogroms' – literally 'after thunder' – had been a recurrent feature of life in Western and Central Europe from medieval times onwards.

En 1863, en Newcastle, el doctor James Hunt había dejado consternada a la audiencia de una reunión de la British Association for the Advancement of Science, al afirmar que los «negros» eran una especie separada de seres humanos, a medio camino entre el mono y el «hombre europeo».

Niall Ferguson

when set in its proper historical context, the present time appears less unnervingly unprecedented and more familiar.

South Slav (Yugoslav)

In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?