Quotes About History

As from the 1490s, the double-headed eagle began to appear as the symbol of state in Moscow as in Vienna, as indeed in Constantinople.

Arguably, the only fruit of the Crusades kept by the Christians was the apricot.

Also in 1492, and also for the first time, the 'new Constantinople—Moscow' may have been given its more familiar label of 'the Third Rome'.

For more than five hundred years the cardinal problem in defining Europe has centred on the inclusion or exclusion of Russia.

Maria Theresa dollar of 1751.

The formula Muscovy + Ukraine = Russia does not feature in the Russians' own version of their history; but it is fundamental.

And now I say unto Thee, take care and take heed, pious Tsar: all the empires of Christendom are united in thine. For two Romes have fallen, and the Third exists; and there will not be a fourth.

They [combatants in the Thirty Years' War] wanted peace and they fought for thirty years to be sure of it. They did not learn then, and have not learned since, that war only breeds war.

Rhea survived an extended visit to the room housing Lord Nelson's cufflinks, while I learned to my delight that even mere mortals could partake of the Covers, the most basic sources for most Royal Navy warship designs. It was Alan who taught me that the Covers were not enough, that I should go to the PRO, too.

skeptics are caught in a dilemma. If they say history cannot be known, then they lose the ability to say evolution is true and Christianity is false. If they admit history can be known, then they must deal with the multiple lines of historical evidence for creation and Christianity.

there aren't missing links—there's a missing chain!

The New Testament is historically reliable. This is evidenced by: a. Early testimony b. Eyewitness testimony

time was just a hangover from the past with no present meaning

By the end of the war, virtually all of America's most important German trading partners from the 1920s and 1930s were to have blood under their fingernails.

Beginning in late 1914 and accelerating over the next three years, the Turkish government rounded up Armenian men for forced labor, worked many to death building a trans-Turkish railway for German business interests, then shot the survivors.

The Armenians," Bristol wrote, "are a race like the Jews—they have little or no national spirit and poor moral character.

But just because no-one sang the story, no-one wrote the book, no-one filmed it, that doesn't mean it didn't happen.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If cavemen had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

History is a creative process (or as Napoleon Bonaparte once said, "a set of lies agreed upon"). The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too.

This is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog. Both creatures know that storytelling is everything, and that the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong.

Every time period that's ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it; no one has ever believed the Chinese aphorism 'May you live in interesting times' did not apply to the life they were coincidentally living.

Her nomination for vice president in 2008 represents the most desperate inclinations of the Republican Party. In two hundred years, I suspect historians will use Palin as an example of how insane America became in the decade following the destruction of the World Trade Center, and her origin story will seem as extraterrestrial and eccentric as Abe Lincoln jumping out of a window to undermine a voting quorum in 1840.

The past has happened, and it can only happen the way it happened.

Teaching history to eighth graders is like being a tour guide for people who hate their vacation.