Quotes About History

John [Ivan] the Terrible

The finances of the Confederacy are one of the great might-have-beens of American history.39 For, in the final analysis, it was as much a lack of hard cash as a lack of industrial capacity or manpower that undercut what was, in military terms, an impressive effort by the Southern states.

a better explanation may be the fundamental deterioration of standards in both legislation and governance that we see in nearly every democracy, regardless of their different twentieth-century histories

Niall Ferguson

If our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people,' he had reminded his Cabinet colleagues in 1878, 'the British Empire would not have been made.

the first symptoms of decline. "The collapse of nations," he argued, was due to "internal rigidity coupled with a decline in the ability, both moral and physical, to shape surrounding circumstances. . . . What would have been Western history if the knights who defeated the Arabs at Tours had surrendered because they believed in the historic inevitability of the triumph of Christianity? Central Europe would today be Moslem."134

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

it is not 'Eurocentrism' or (anti-)'Orientalism' to say that the rise of Western civilization is the single most important historical phenomenon of the second half of the second millennium after Christ. It is a statement of the obvious.

Niall Ferguson

Niall Ferguson

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political physics with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

Though we hear much less about it, India had made a bigger contribution to the imperial war than Australia in terms of both finance and manpower.

My generation feels like it's the lucky one,' she told me one night. 'Our grandparents had the Great Leap Forward, our parents had the Cultural Revolution. But we get to study, to travel, to make money. So I guess we really don't think that much about the Square thing.

Cities with at least one printing press in 1500 were significantly more likely to adopt Protestantism than cities without printing, but it was cities with multiple competing printers that were most likely to turn Protestant.

The Qing Empire was about to feel the full force of history's most successful narco-state: the British Empire.

how far history is distorted by the dubious benefit of hindsight.

The popular view was that (as in the 1790s) the blood tax – l'impôt du sang – should be borne by all

The British had built railways across their Empire with the labour of Asian 'coolies'. Now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of world history, the Japanese forced 60,000 British and Australian PoWs – as well as Dutch prisoners and conscripted Indian labour – to construct 250 miles of railway through the mountainous jungle on the Thai-Burmese border.

For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has dug.

We must resist the temptation to romanticize history's losers.

Everyone who wants to know what will happen ought to examine what has happened: everything in this world in any epoch has their replicas in antiquity.