Quotes About History

The Church of the Holy Virgin was built during the first century," he told us. "The monastery itself was founded in the fourth century at the time of Abba Pachomius in AD 342.

Christ wrote nothing in his lifetime

The story, the history, of Navy men in extremis animates the idea that Americans can do anything when it is necessary and when it counts.

Legend, tradition, history can drive a commitment to excellence that raises people and has them perform at a level above anything they ever dreamed they could do. And it makes all of us realize the potential that everybody has who serves for you and goes to sea on ships.

The journalist and critic I. F. Stone would call the state of mind that permitted the Pearl Harbor attack "sheer stodgy unimaginative bureaucratic complacency.

You can't make history all the time, Dougie. Sometimes the best you can do is make money.

There is no proportion. Pearl Harbor took care of that.

I love thinking about American history, thinking about LA history. I love brooding on crime.

Silver Shirts

We men of this age are rotten with book-lore and with a yearning for the past.

The Bible was written two thousand years ago. The world is a different place now. Stories that had meaning then are meaningless now. Beliefs that might have been valid then are invalid now. Those books should be looked at in the same way we look at anything of that age with interest with an acknowledgement of the historical importance but they should not be thought of as anything that has any value.

The history of life is written in terms of negative entropy.

Why do we need time travel, when we already travel through space so far and fast? For history. For mystery. For nostalgia. For hope. To examine our potential and explore our memories. To counter regret for the life we lived, the only life, one dimension, beginning to end.

China's official State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television issued a warning and denunciation of time travel in 2011, concerned that such stories interfere with history—"casually

Thomas Hobbes, in the seventeenth century, resisted his era's new-media hype: "The invention of printing, though ingenious, compared with the invention of letters is no great matter." Up to a point, he was right. Every new medium transforms the nature of human thought. In the long run, history is the story of information becoming aware of itself.

Feynman resented the polished myths of most scientific history, submerging the false steps and halting uncertainties under a surface of orderly intellectual progress, but he created a myth of his own.

The writing system at the opposite extreme took the longest to emerge: the alphabet, one symbol for one minimal sound. The alphabet is the most reductive, the most subversive of all scripts. In all the languages of earth there is only one word for alphabet (alfabet, alfabeto, ). The alphabet was invented only once.

A "file" was originally—in sixteenth-century England—a wire on which slips and bills and notes and letters could be strung for preservation and reference. Then came file folders, file drawers, and file cabinets; then the electronic namesakes of all these; and the inevitable irony. Once a piece of information is filed, it is statistically unlikely ever to be seen again by human eyes.

In an instant, the law was transformed: from the last passenger on the safe-haven bandwagon to a pioneer into uncharted territory. For the first time in American history, it was not only legal to relinquish a baby; in Nebraska, it was okay to abandon any child of any age for any reason at any time - with the full protection of the law.

Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.

Once the state has been founded, there can no longer be any heroes. They come on the scene only in uncivilized conditions.

My father had played the guitar when he was young, and my uncle Jack had worked for Kalamazoo, before the war, developing guitar pickups. So there was a kind of family thing about the guitar, although it was considered something of an anomaly then.

My uncle used to fight Vale Tudo, and my mother even cornered him in some of his fights.

All my grandparents and great aunts and uncle love 'Foyle's War.' They all lived through the war and love to see it reconstructed so authentically.