Quotes About History

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

People say Americans like coming to England to see the old stuff 'cos they haven't got any old things in their own country, but they would if they stopped crushing it or blowing shit up.

Long dismissed as children's stories or 'myths' by Westerners, Australian Aboriginal stories have only recently begun to be taken seriously for what they are: the longest continuous record of historic events and spirituality in the world.

One's own life seemed puny against the background of so much history.

The future was coming nearer, one relentless goose step after the next. Juliet could still remember when Hitler had seemed like a harmless clown. No one was amused now. ("The clowns are the dangerous ones," Perry said.)

As you got older and time went on, you realized that the distinction between truth and fiction didn't really matter because eventually everything disappeared into the soupy, amnesiac mess of history. Personal or political, it made no difference.

What did science ever do for the world, apart from make better ways of killing people?" Sylvie said.

He wondered what a visitor from the past would make of it. It used to be the poor who were thin and the rich who were fat, now it seemed to be the other way round.

That was how history worked, wasn't it? If it wasn't written down it never existed. You might leave behind jewelry and pottery, ornamental tombs, you might leave behind your own bones to be dug up at a later age, but none of those artifacts could express how you felt .

Time isn't circular," she said to Dr. Kellet. "It's like a… palimpsest.

The past is what you take with you.

Sometimes Jackson thought that the past wasn't just another country, it was a lost continent somewhere at the bottom of an unknown ocean.

Not his real home, his real home, the one he never named any more, was the dark and sooty chamber in his heart that contained his sister and his brother and, because it was an accommodating kind of space, the entire filthy history of the industrial revolution.

Don't you wonder sometimes,' Ursula said. 'If just one small thing had been changed, in the past, I mean. If Hitler had died at birth, or if someone had kidnapped him as a baby and brought him up in--I don't know, say, a Quaker household--surely things would be different.

The Germans were victims of the Nazis too, but one can't say that too loudly, of course.

All those unclaimed arms and legs lost in the fields of Flanders – Ursula imagined them pushing roots down into the mud and shoots up to the sky and growing once again into men. An army of men marching back for revenge.

There's too much history in York, the past is so crowded that sometimes it feels as if there's no room for the living.

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but, all unwept and unknown, are lost in the distant night, since they are without a divine poet (to chronicle their deeds).

In those days, man, in the '50s, black people in the South... We didn't recognize contracts that much. And we didn't recognize marriages that much, either.

In its amplest meaning History includes every trace and vestige of everything that man has done or thought since first he appeared on the earth.

The man who first gave history a recognized place in science was an ancient historian.

The Irish are people who will never have leaders, for at the great moment they always desert them. They have produced one skeleton--Parnell--never a man.

Crimes of which a people is ashamed constitute its real history. The same is true of man.

I will insist that the Hebrews have done more to civilize man than any other nation.