Quotes About History

At the Battle of the Somme in France, more than sixty thousand British soldiers died on the battle's first day alone.476

The reason to have history is to be able to say, 'This is where you came from. This is what it cost. This is what happened to us. This is what we fought against. This is what we did when we won. This is who we are.

As the motion picture finished—the first ever to be screened at the White House—President Wilson declared it a triumph. D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation was "like writing history with lightning," the president gushed. "And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true.

Wars have always started over religion.

The same president who has insisted that core moralism drives him has brought America to its lowest moral standing in history.

US journalists, for years overwhelmingly enamored of Barack Obama, were now commonly speaking of him in these terms: as some sort of grave menace to press freedoms, the most repressive leader in this regard since Richard Nixon. That was quite a remarkable turn for a politician who was ushered into power vowing "the most transparent administration in US history.

The second covered the history of the Bush warrantless eavesdropping program, based on a top secret 2009 internal report from the NSA's inspector general; another detailed the BOUNDLESS INFORMANT program that I had read about on the plane;

Se prego in cuor mio che la consapevolezza e il dibattito pubblico porteranno a una riforma, so anche che le politiche degli uomini mutano nel tempo, e persino la Costituzione viene sovvertita quando la fame di potere lo richiede. Traendo insegnamento dalla storia, dunque, non si parli più di fiducia nell'uomo, ma si vincoli quest'ultimo, contro il mal fare, con le catene della crittografia.

Snowden had been clear from our first conversation about his rationale for distrusting the establishment media with his story, repeatedly referring to the New York Times's concealment of NSA eavesdropping. He had come to believe that the paper's concealment of that information may very well have changed the outcome of the 2004 election. "Hiding that story changed history," he said.

History shows that the mere existence of a mass surveillance apparatus, regardless of how it is used, is in itself sufficient to stifle dissent.

Of the approximately 2,900 Jewish Nasielskers who remained in Poland, fewer than ten survived the war.

Why do some details become "history"—included in schoolbooks, in scholarly dissertations, or in personal narratives—while other details are forgotten? What scale of information do we accept when we say that we know something about the past?

Many of the characters named in this book existed, as did the shadowy order sometimes known as the Brotherhood of St. John of Tobolsk.

One of the first laws against air pollution came in 1300 when King Edward I decreed the death penalty for burning of coal. At least one execution for that offense is recorded. But economics triumphed over health considerations, and air pollution became an appalling problem in England.

Although some Jews "traveled by donkey," the Jews of Spain, for the most part, walked out of their country. These refugees were the "scholars, the sons and daughters of families who had served their monarchs . . . shoemakers, tanners, butchers, the old, the pregnant, [and] the young."6

There are no absolute truths, and the best historians know that. You strive to capture a moment of time, and if your work is done properly, history becomes a written photograph.

The root of oppression is the loss of memory.

Feminism is memory.

No wonder oral history turns out to be more accurate than written history. The first is handed down from the many who were present. The second is written by the few who probably weren't.

So many of us are living out the unlived lives of our mothers.

The irony here is that thanks to molecular archaeology—which includes the study of ancient DNA to trace human movement over time—we now know that men have been the stay-at-homes, and women have been the travelers. The rate of intercontinental migration for women is about eight times that for men.

There is history in what is dismissed as prehistory.

the model for the U.S. Constitution was not ancient Greece but the Iroquois Confederacy. Then

the Catholic Church not only didn't oppose abortion but actually regulated it until the mid-nineteenth century. It was made a mortal sin mostly for population reasons.8 Napoleon III wanted more soldiers, and Pope Pius IX wanted all the teaching positions in the French schools—plus the doctrine of papal infallibility—so they traded. Also