Quotes About History

How could you begin to explain London? A city once the color of tobacco and carrots, now chalky stone and angled steel, but vivid chimney pots can still be glimpsed between slivers of rain-specked glass. Nine billion pounds' worth of Christmas bonuses have just been spent in the city's square mile.

In the history of the world, no censor has ever been looked back on with respect.

Throughout history, human nature remains unchanged. The world's oldest questions are still being asked. Medea, Oedipus, we're not adding anything that the Greeks didn't already know.

In 1939, London was the largest city in the world.

Thanks to Hitler, we are no longer living in a world that cares about the death of someone because they were loved in the past. It cares only if that death can do damage to the future.

I have to go, I'm being asked to join a conga line through the Byzantine reliquaries.

I'll have you know I keep detailed notes. Mistakes sometimes occur in translation.' 'Why do your notes need translating?' 'I write them in Aramaic. It's a three-thousand-year-old language so I have to make up a lot of words.

It sounds like something you'd find in a pack of tarot cards. Or a Robert Louis Stevenson novel. Certainly not London in the twenty-first century.' 'That's the thing about the backstreets of Bloomsbury. They've barely changed in hundreds of years. They'll probably be the same long after—

The past is a weight that can end up crushing your life.

Thanks to Hitler, we are no longer living in a world that cares about the death of someone because they were loved in the past. It cares only if that death can do damage to the future. It's a grim truth, Sidney. Like Orpheus leaving Hades, we are rushing headlong into the light of a terrible new world.

It was foolish, the things a person would do because their parents had done the same.

History has to be rewritten in every generation, because although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks new questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it re-lives different aspects of the experiences of its predecessors.

Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

Why do humans exist? A major part of the answer: because Pikaia Gracilens survived the Burgess decimation.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.

The high ambition, therefore, seems to me to be this: That one should strive to combine the maximum of impatience with the maximum of skepticism, the maximum of hatred of injustice and irrationality with the maximum of ironic self-criticism. This would mean really deciding to learn from history rather than invoking or sloganising it.

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth.

Some say that because the United States was wrong before, it cannot possibly be right now, or has not the right to be right. (The British Empire sent a fleet to Africa and the Caribbean to maintain the slave trade while the very same empire later sent another fleet to enforce abolition. I would not have opposed the second policy because of my objections to the first; rather it seems to me that the second policy was morally necessitated by its predecessor.)

This surrender, by a man of the Enlightenment and a man of truly revolutionary and democratic temperament, is another reminder that history is a tragedy and not a morality tale

We make no saint of Thomas Jefferson—we leave the mindless business of canonization and the worship of humans to the fanatics—but aware as we are of his many crimes and contradictions we say with confidence that his memory and example will endure long after the moral pygmies who try to blot out his name have been forgotten.

History is more of a tragedy than it is a morality tale.

A consciousness of rectitude can be a terrible thing, and in those days I didn't just think that I was right: I thought that "we" (our group of International Socialists in particular) were being damn well proved right. If you have never yourself had the experience of feeling that you are yoked to the great steam engine of history, then allow me to inform you that the conviction is a very intoxicating one.