Quotes About History

Islands have their own rules, especially if they're blood-soaked.

whatever complicated emotions I felt for him, I didn't want to ruin the moment with my unfortunately stereotypical American ignorance of history and geography.

there is no saying how events in one place may affect what happens elsewhere, for the tapestry of history is woven of many threads.

As William Ferris is fond of saying, "in Africa when an older person dies, a library burns.

What interests me is the experience of ordinary people. To tell you the truth, although I can repeat certain dates, statistics, and so on, what I am really curious about is what happens to ordinary men, women, and children in extraordinary times.

places leave their mark in the same way that a human being can touch us. We have to make our peace with place, with the locations where we have spent time. We consider how we've been affected by being present in a certain spot - and how the place itself is changed by what has come to pass. You only have to visit a battlefield long after a war has ended, to know that places are never quite the same following a tragedy.

you should know that all maps are drawn in hindsight. And hindsight, if interpreted with care, is what brings us wisdom.

the entire area was once apple orchards – all down to Henry the Eighth and his desire for an abundant supply of fresh fruit in days of yore.

We are all impacted by the events that will become history.

There was no bathroom—there wouldn't be a bathroom until I was almost fourteen, the same year America put a man on the moon. But we had a proper outside WC with a tall rusting iron cistern high up on the wall and a chain for the flush. There was no mains drainage and it often fell to my father to unblock the septic because the access cover for the system that served the whole street was just outside our kitchen window. Oh, those Victorian builders were a clever lot!

As friends they knew each other's history, knew the twists and turns that had brought them to this place in the world. And they understood each other's fears and frailties; nothing had to be explained. Now

Sometimes the worries of the world give one pause for thought, and one wonders—especially someone of my antiquity—why history is not a more efficient teacher.

u dare to threaten me?"she retaliated, gaining her feet as she faced off with the Enforcer in what had to be the most unwise action in Council history since the decision to go to war with the Druids.

There is no sense in doing without the concepts of metaphysics in order to attack metaphysics. We have no language—no syntax and no lexicon—which is alien to this history; we cannot utter a single destructive proposition which has not already slipped into the form, the logic, and the implicit postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.

One of the meanings of what is called a victim ( a victim of anything or anyone whatsoever) is precisely to be erased in its meaning as victim. The absolute victim is a victim who cannot even protest. One cannot even identify the victim as victim. He or she cannot even present himself or herself as such. He or she is completely covered by language, annihilated by history, a victim one cannot identify.

I'm in favor or tradition. I'm respectful of and a lover of the tradition. There's no deconstruction without the memory of the tradition.

Prayer holds together the shattered fragments of creation. It makes history possible.

L'Histoire ne connaît pas de miracle.

For most of history, man has had to fight nature to survive; in this century he is beginning to realize that, in order to survive, he must protect it.

Los colombianos constantemente buscaban excusas para verter más sangre. De

Kepler was, as author Arthur Koestler called him, the "watershed" where the medieval world finally gave way to the modern.

Giovanni de' Medici

Piazza del Campidoglio

Jan Hus. Kepler was part of the funeral