Quotes About History

The trouble with history, it seems to me, is that there are too many people involved.

Musicians had been assholes since the day the lute was invented

C'era forse un posto più noioso al mondo del British Museum? Se c'era, Will non voleva sapere quale. Vasi. Monete. Brocche. Intere sale piene di piatti. Secondo Will doveva esserci uno scopo per mettere in mostra delle cose, e il fatto che fossero vecchie non significava necessariamente che fossero interessanti. Solo perché erano sopravvissute al tempo, non significava che tu volessi guardarle

Love and charity share the same root word (caritas). How is that possible, when everything in our recent history suggest they cannot coexist, that they are antiethical, that if you put the two of them together in a sack they would bite and scratch and scream, until one of them is torn apart?

The identity of the Filipino today is of a person asking what is his identity.

Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino.

The cinema is, after all, the most timid of the arts. It never sets trends, it merely reflects them. The harm has been done long before the movies set cameras on the scene. Warring teen-age gangs antedated Rebel Without A Cause , at least in the United States; and the most infamous teen-age killer in Philippine history operated during the liberation times, long before James Dean was heard of.

Shouldn't we rather recognize that each person is a sort of unconscious anthology of all epochs of man; and that he may at times be moving simultaneously among different epochs?

This is the difference between the Spanish advent and the American; that the technical revolution provoked by the first produced the Filipino, while the cultural upheaval provoked by the second merely helped us to become more aware of this Filipinoness.

Core metabolism has changed little in part because it was never powered down in its four-billion-year history. The genes are custodians of this flame, but without the flame life is – dead.

was a world on which life emerged, 3,800 million years ago, perhaps animated by something of the restlessness of the planet itself.

there isn't a full consensus among experts. But strip away a few more skins from the onion of time and, by 3,400 million years ago

Bacteria dominated our planet for another 2,500 million years before the first truly complex organisms appeared in the fossil record.

The first true eyes appeared somewhat abruptly in the fossil record around 540 million

We know a great deal about the molecular mechanisms of evolution and about the history of life on our planet, but far less about which parts of this history are chance – trajectories that could have played out quite differently on other planets – and which bits are dictated by physical laws or constraints.

There were traces of history everywhere—in street names, on inn signs, in old tracks and ancient hedgerows, buried walls and tumbled gravestones. Scratch the surface and it was there.

Even the dead had names.

I have not found among my possessions anything which I've held more dear, nor valued so much, as the knowledge of the actions of great men, acquired by long experience in contemporary affairs, and a continual study of ancient history…

From the point of view of the Chinese Communist Party, the greatest casualties of the Cultural Revolution were the Party's prestige and its ability to govern.

Our ancestors pay the price for who we are

Like human memory, the surface of our planet distorts the record, emphasising more recent events and letting the rest pass into vagueness - or at least into unimpressive joints in worn down mountain chains.

It was Islam's armies and the empire they spread across three continents that reduced Christianity, with a few scattered exceptions, to a European faith.

The House of Savoy never finished a war on the same side it started, unless the war lasted long enough to change sides twice," a Free French newspaper commented sarcastically.