Quotes About History

No history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leads from the slingshot to the megaton bomb.

No heirloom of humankind captures the past as do art and language.

In my world, history comes down to language and art. No one cares much about what battles were fought, who won them and who lost them - unless there is a painting, a play, a song or a poem that speaks of the event.

We Jews have a special attachment to the Book. The study of page after page in tomes yellowing with age was obligatory.

It is precisely the envelopment of sex (and all other natural functions) with an aura of deeper meaning that makes man human and distinguishes him from the rest of animate nature. To remove that meaning, to reduce sex to biology, as all the sexual revolutionaries did in practice, is to return man to a level of primitive behavior of which we have no record in human history. All animals have sex, but only man makes love.

Behaviorism was but one instance of a terrible temptation for all intellectuals, namely that of nothing-but-ism. History is nothing but the clash of class interests, human behavior is nothing but a response to economic incentives, etc., etc.

Europe has changed without knowing how to conserve: that is its tragedy.

Many of the rioters were obviously bourgeois, the scions of privileged families, as have been the leaders of so many destructive movements in modern history. That same evening, I dined in an expensive restaurant and saw there a fellow diner whom I had observed a few hours before joyfully heaving a brick through a window. How much destruction did he think his country could bear before his own life might be affected, his own existence compromised?

history is nothing but the backward projection of current grievances, real or imagined, used to justify and inflame resentment.

The object of such historiography is to disconnect everyone from a real sense of a living past and a living culture.

In the history of art, unlike that of science, what comes after is not necessarily better than what came before.

In 1927, Robert Graves published a little book called *Lars Porsena or the Future of Swearing and Improper Language*. He noted a recent decline in the use of foul language by the English, and predicted that this decline would continue indefinitely, until foul language had all but disappeared from the average man's vocabulary. History has not borne him out, to say the least: indeed, I have known economists make more accurate predictions.

Havana is like Beirut, without having gone through the civil war to achieve the destruction.

No man is so brilliant that he can work out everything for himself, so that the wisdom of ages has nothing useful to tell him. To imagine otherwise is to indulge in the most egotistical of hubris.

The social and cultural critic Theodor Adorno eloquently voiced this cast of mind when he proclaimed the final death of art after the Second World War. After Auschwitz, he said, it was no longer possible to produce fine art. The world had become too horrible. 'There is nothing innocuous left,' he declared. 'The

It is one thing for traditions to die out of themselves; it is quite another for them to be killed by men who think they know everything, by men whose vengeance extends even to the past, even to the dead.

The work of cultural destruction, while often swifter, easier, and more self-conscious than that of construction, is not the work of a moment. Rome wasn't destroyed in a day.

The reign of Elizabeth I had conferred this right, as a way of dealing with the epidemic of begging that followed the dissolution of the monasteries.

The 'smoke-filled room' as political reality is now as dead as Prohibition.

The Americans of the age were not an irreligious people; and the fact that they were Christian was very important, for the marks of Christianity lay all across the Constitution.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

Sons of the dark and bloody ground.

[America is] a rebellious nation. Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born; our creeds were infidelity to the mother church; our constitution treason to our fatherland.

We are a rebellious nation. Our whole history is treason; our blood was attained before we were born; our creeds were infidelity to the mother church; our constitution treason to our fatherland.