Quotes About History

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Look, men have been sleeping with men for thousands of years—and raising tribes. This is a Western sickness, it really is. It's an artificial division. Men will be sleeping with each other when the trumpet sounds. It's only this infantile culture which has made such a big deal of it.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read." ? James Baldwin, interview, 1963.

I yet contend that the mobs in the streets of Hitler's Germany were those in the streets not by the will of the German state, but by the will of the western world, including those architects of human freedom, the British...

All of the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. Vile as I am, states one of the characters in Dostoevsky's The Idiot, I don't believe in the wagons that bring bread to humanity. For the wagons that bring bread to humanity, may coldly exclude a considerable part of humanity from enjoying what is brought.

Every man should keep minutes of whatever he reads. Every circumstance of his studies should be recorded; what books he has consulted; how much of them he has read; at what times; how often the same authors; and what opinions he formed of them, at different periods of his life. Such an account would much illustrate the history of his mind.

Our sole concern with the long dead is aesthetic

The dominant pattern of history isn't stability, but instability; the dominant pattern of business isn't perpetuation of the incumbents, but triumph of the insurgents; the dominant pattern of capitalism isn't equilibrium, but what Joseph Schumpeter famously described as the "perennial gale of creative destruction

the big winners in corporate history consistently surpassed a threshold level of innovation required to compete in their industries. But what truly set the big winners apart was their ability to turn initial success into a sustained flywheel, even if they started out behind the pioneers

È difficile sopravvalutare l'importanza della sedentarietà e dell'affollamento che ha reso possibile: significa che in pratica tutte le malattie infettive causate da microorganismi specificatamente adattati all' homo sapiens hanno iniziato a esistere soltanto diecimila anni fa, forse molte di loro solo negli ultimi cinquemila anni; che sono un «effetto della civiltà» nel vero senso della parola.

Lo sviluppo dello stato in Mesopotamia non è stato per niente lineare. I piccoli stati della pianura alluvionale avevano, come i loro abitanti, un'aspettativa di vita molto limitata. Gli interregni erano più comuni dei «regni» ed erano normali lunghi periodi di caduta e frammentazione.

Lo stato antico, un po' come il clima, spesso costituiva una minaccia, non un beneficio.

Why the histories of states should have so persistently insinuated themselves in the place that might have been occupied by peoples merits reflection.

For nearly three hundred years, the Spanish calendar for the Philippines had been one day ahead of the Spanish calendar, because Magellan's expedition had not, of course, adjusted for their westward travel halfway around the globe.

in the summer of 1845 Edward Little was sixteen years old and restless in his blood.

History is a record of human nature in action.

Just imagine coming from people of two different races that had not a blamed thing in common except a love of blood in every which way. Imagine knowing your white daddy was a robber and killer just crazy with greed who raped your Indian momma who herself believed in cutting out people's hearts to please the gods and eating what was left of the victim.

Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.

There is no such thing as history undistorted. Decisive transformations of meaning occurred, and are occurring still.

I'll thank you to remember that not so many years ago men were burned at the stake just for saying the earth went round the sun!

They're wise in China. There the first of a dynasty's always a peasant or the son of a peasant, and the throne's always taken by force with bloody hands. No hereditary caste there—isn't that China's strength?

Any history book will tell them China always crosses her borders to protect her buffer zones when any invader approaches

Jurata, Queen of the Baltic.

This was the spot, Mounir told me, where Pharaoh's daughter had discovered Moses while he was drifting past on the river. "I thought Moses had been rescued by the princess at Al-Maadi," I reminded Mounir. Mounir adjusted his shoulder bag as we walked back to the car. "Does it really matter, Mr. James? The important thing to know is that the Holy Family embarked from here, just as they did from Al-Maadi. Both places claim Moses as their own.