Quotes About History

If there are no books. There is no civilization.

Is is seldom possible to say of the medievals that they *always* did one thing and *never* another; they were marvelously inconsistent.

Like the Jews before them, the Irish enshrined literacy as their central religious act.

Since time is no longer cyclical but one-way and irreversible, personal history is now possible and an individual life can have value.

Well, they may not be civilized, but they are certainly confident--and this confidence is one of the open-handed pleasures of early Irish literature.

Patrick's gift to the Irish was his Christianity - the first de-Romanized Christianity in human history, a Christianity without the sociopolitical baggage of the Greco-Roman world, a Christianity that completely inculturated itself into the Irish scene.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.

A force as of madness in the hands of reason has done all that was ever done in the world.

France was a long despotism tempered by epigrams.

The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

History is a mighty dramos, enacted upon the theatre of times, with suns for lamps and eternity for a background.

Histories are a kind of distilled newspapers.

History a distillation of rumor.

No great man lives in vain. The history of the world is but the biography of great men.

It is part of my creed that the only poetry is history, could we tell it right.

[W]hat mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous pedantry dig up from the past time and name it History.

In a certain sense all men are historians.

History, a distillation of rumour.

History shows that the majority of people that have done anything great have passed their youth in seclusion.

Nothing that was worthy in the past departs no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.

The three great elements of modern civilization, Gun powder, Printing, and the Protestant religion.

Great men are the inspired (speaking and acting) texts of that divine Book of Revelations, whereof a chapter is completed from epoch to epoch, and by some named History.

France was long a despotism tempered by epigrams.

All great peoples are conservative.