Quotes About History

History takes time. History makes memory.

It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is the first of the last generation.

Me pareció entonces que las palabras que oía, cuanto más resonaban de inextricables cadencias indígenas, más removían en las profundidades un antiguo y familiar presagio: era necesario morir, en la historia de cada cual había una traición,

Just as the ripples of a stone thrown into a pond will spread further and further away from the source, so the ripples of the disaster in 1948 hit my parents first and then spread to us and to our children long afterwards. Seeing only the ripples, it was easy to confuse the original cause with its effects.

All that is dead carries the echoes of life.

Lest we forget that Shakespeare spelled his surname in five different ways. None of them was S H A K E S P E A R E.

The history of my life must begin by the earliest circumstance which my memory can evoke it will therefore commence when I had attained the age of eight years and four months.

So, ignorant of man and of the age that he calls ancient, and of the descendants following their ancestors, nature stays evergreen; indeed she travels such a long road she might as well be standing still. Meanwhile kingdoms fall, languages and peoples die; she doesn't see. Yet man takes it upon himself to praise eternity.

Man for Leopardi is first and foremost an animal, and his history is merely the last section of the much more ancient history of all living species, which in their turn are an integral part of the entire ecological system.

For Leopardi the ancients and orality, uniquely endowed with the capacity to keep memory alive, were in fact one and the same thing (Z 4270 and note 2

he is one of those good teachers who "are capable of retracing in detail, and holding accurately in their minds the origins, progress, mode of development, in short, the history of their own notions and thoughts, their knowledge and their intellect" (Z 1376).

i vinti che più ispirano la nostra pietà sono le persone che non stavano con nessuna delle due parti in lotta. E che dopo la fine della guerra sono state dimenticate dalla storia.»

Avrà magari ragione il professor Weinberger a sperare che <> finisca per essere più intelligente di noi, ma la storia ideologica del XX secolo è purtroppo piena di esempi in cui individui e teorie <> hanno poi innescato conformismi, deprimenti in democrazia, tragici nei sistemi totalitari.

Il mondo può progredire e in effetti progredisce per effetto di azioni umane positive, per effetto dell'impegno, per effetto della non-indifferenza. Il principio vale per le azioni globali e per le azioni locali e noi dobbiamo tenerne conto. [...] Io sono convinto che la storia si muova verso il progresso e che rispetto a questo progresso l'azione consapevole degli individui e delle collettività sia fondamentale, e dunque doverosa.

In short, the post–Cold War order is unraveling, and while not perfect, it will be missed.

believed that education was damaging—too much blood to a woman's brain would cause reproductive malfunction. To prove her

The widow's own grandmother had believed that education was damaging — too much blood to a woman's brain would cause reproductive malfunction.

The people who burned witches at the stake never for one moment thought of their act as violence; rather they thought of it as an act of divinely mandated righteousness. The same can be said of most of the violence humans have ever committed.

The very word, religio—to bind (ligio) back (re)—suggests exactly this. Thus these ancient cultures remained profoundly backward oriented. This ritualized return to a primordial past, the very essence of mythological forms of recollection, is what de Lubac perceptively characterized as a "deliberate (though admittedly still instinctive) refusal of history.

America want nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can, even if it turns out to be only last week. Not to face now or the future, but to face backwards.

Shakespeare's bitter play [Troilus and Cressida] is therefore a dramatization of a part of a translation into English of the French translation of a Latin imitation of an old French expansion of a Latin epitome of a Greek romance. (p. 55)

People who make history know nothing about history. You can see that in the sort of history they make.

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.