Quotes About History

The preservation of individualism—of either type—has historically required the suppression of less privileged voices. The unacknowledged social underpinning of both forms of individualism is caste, privilege, and exclusivity.

We all marry our unfinished business. We all marry our mothers and fathers. And in our closest relationships, we become our mothers and fathers.

I needed to build a four-hundred-square-foot enclosure, with a curbed concrete-slab floor six inches thick. The fence needed to be five-gauge cyclone fencing. I contacted several building companies and discovered that no manufacturer had made five-gauge cyclone fencing since World War II.

Reverend Samuel Worcester was released from a Georgia prison, after serving four years of hard labor for speaking out against the mistreatment of Cherokee Indians.

POSH Before air-conditioning, cabins on the side of ocean liners facing the sun became unbearably hot. Thus richer passengers paid a premium to have their tickets on the P&O Line from England to India stamped "Port Out—Starboard Home." So p.o.s.h. became a synonym for someone who was upper class. PULL

Central governments have always been the greatest danger to mankind.

Although French soldiers have a reputation for dash and flamboyancy, in fact their army was heavily regulated, bureaucratic and relied on working practices and traditions dating well back into the 18th century and beyond .

The only politician ever to have entered parliament with honourable intentions, was Guy Fawkes.

then forcing his wife to eat the roasted flesh! Amazingly, two enemies, an English

There is proof that these early kings were taller and had much larger heads than the peasants of Egypt!

Yet the Romans did something the heart-ripping Aztecs and the Spanish burners didn't do … they killed people for fun! The Romans made murder into a sport. They built wonderful buildings like the Colosseum, filled them with happy Romans and then massacred thousands of people and animals for entertainment.

Lincoln died from a bullet to the head while he sat next to his wife in the Ford Theatre. Kennedy died from a bullet to the head while he sat next to his wife in a Ford car.

If history, philosophy and so on vanish from academic life, what they leave in their wake may be a technical training facility or corporate research institute. But it will not be a university in the classical sense of the term, and it would be deceptive to call it one.

Irish fiction is full of secrets, guilty pasts, divided identities. It is no wonder that there is such a rich tradition of Gothic writing in a nation so haunted by history.

It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere.

The study of history and philosophy, accompanied by some acquaintance with art and literature, should be for lawyers and engineers as well as for those who study in arts faculties.

Because subjects like literature and art history have no obvious material pay-off, they tend to attract those who look askance at capitalist notions of utility. The idea of doing something purely for the delight of it has always rattled the grey-bearded guardians of the state. Sheer pointlessness has always been a deeply subversive affair.

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism.

The New Testament is a brutal destroyer of human illusions. If you follow Jesus and don't end up dead, it appears you have some explaining to do. The stark signifier of the human condition is one who spoke up for love and justice and was done to death for his pains. The traumatic truth of human history is a mutilated body.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

We may pretend that we're basically moral people who make mistakes, but the whole of history proves otherwise.

But it is the spot that the Lord of History says is His own personal real estate, and the very place where He will bring history to its conclusion.

Medieval learning was really advanced.

Oddly, none of the chroniclers who describe this 'sack of Rome' seem at all interested in the fact that what was being taken had actually been brought to the city as loot in the first place. And whereas the Romans had destroyed the places from which they took their plunder, not a single building in Rome was destroyed by the Vandals.