Quotes About History

Later, your mother says, Didn't everything used to have a name?

There be of them, that have left a name behind them, that their praises might be reported. And some there be, which have no memorial; who are perished, as though they had never been; and are become as though they had never been born; and their children after them. — ECCLESIASTICUS 44:8–9 Barn

Even the most made up of stories has its roots in the truth. That one more so than many.

History is precious; ritual is precious. Lose that and we lose the knowledge of our own being, Lose the thread of ancestry, lose the tales, and we are adrift without identity.

My principles are only those that, before the French Revolution, every well-born person considered sane and normal.

No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.

B. A. Botkin's Lay My Burden Down and the Federal Writers' Project book, The Negro in Virginia.

I am the history of the rejection of who I am

increasingly weak. Then, half a century after Lord Macartney's failed mission, the closed door was pushed ajar by Britain through the Opium

MAO TSE-TUNG, who for decades held absolute power over the lives of one-quarter of the world's population, was responsible for well over 70 million deaths in peacetime, more than any other twentieth-century leader.

Long-lasting peace … is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace … When we look at history, we adore the times of war when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored … human nature loves sudden swift changes.

Cixi's tolerance of attacks on her government-and on herself-as well as her willingness to permit a diversity of viewpoints were rematched by any of her predessors or, arguably, her successors.

It was Cixi who championed women's liberation in a culture that had for centuries imposed foot-binding on its female population-a practice to which she put an end.

Foreign opium imported into China was chiefly produced in British India and shipped solely from British ports.

Indeed Empress Dowager Cixi had forseen that her reforms, drastically changing China, could in the end bury her own dynasty.

Empress Dowager Cixi's legacy was manifold and towering.

Yaban KuÄŸular? - Çin'de Üç K?zkardeÅŸ

Looking back over the many horrific decades after Cixi's demise, one cannot but admire this amazing stateswoman, flawed though she was.

The past hundred years have been most unfair to Cixi, who has been deemed either tyrannical and vicious or hopelessly incompetent or both.

For all her faults, she was no despot.

In China, one was accustomed to a certain amount of injustice

he is thinking about thoughts; so many thoughts piled up, such a quantity of half-remembered knowledge, so many emotions brought up from the well to spill out: the unrolling of history - a river into which you can't step twice, a collection of biographies end to end, a hilltop to survey the surrounding plains and so on - but also, more so, the anxieties prompted by the spooling of time and the awareness of its unstoppable nature; and random thoughts...

Cobbles are enormously evocative, like the scent of forgotten objects and remembered melodies.

The same sand currents had swallowed up and destroyed flourishing cities and great empires. They called it the sabulation of the Roman Empire, if he remembered rightly.