Quotes About History

Part of the complexity of living through history is the process of explaining things about the past that you never explained to yourself. So many temporary realties, distantly viewed in the rearview mirror, will appear ridiculous to any person who wasn't there.

In Western culture, virtually everything is understood through the process of storytelling, often to the detriment of reality. When we recount history, we tend to use the life experience of one person — the "journey" of a particular "hero," in the lingo of the mythologist Joseph Campbell — as a prism for understanding everything else.

Nobody ever talks about building a time machine in order to go back and kill Judas.

The primacy of a landline connection dictated how life was lived, with such deep-rooted universality that its role in shaping humanity was virtually unconsidered. It was the single most important feature of every home, and nobody cared.

Most live video footage was not permanently saved, often taped over to reduce costs (some of the only material that remains from this period was recorded by one private citizen—Marion Stokes, a Philadelphia woman who compulsively recorded and stored over 40,000 VHS tapes of news broadcasts between the years of 1979 and 2012, eventually donating the collection to the Vanderbilt Television News Archive).

But its more illuminating feature is something that often happens with popular history: An attempt at analyzing the distant past ends up being more astute about the living present.

Before the 1975 fight in Manila, Ali bragged about attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting; he met with the KKK's leadership because they agreed on the issue of interracial marriage (both sides saw it as an atrocity). The

the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past]

In other words, people who don't know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility. But we question this far less when the information comes from the past. It's so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.

It's difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters and settle on a few famous names.

One of the things they desired most desperately was freedom of religion, based on the premise that Europe wasn't religious enough.

Hitler is the human catch-all for all other terrible humans.

But here's the thing: He didn't get hung. The man climbed on a wooden watercraft and collided with North America by accident. It doesn't matter what happened afterwards or what his motives were. He found it. It happened. He's what history is. It was his destiny to be that particular man, and it was his destiny to do those specific things.

The compulsion to reconsider the past through the ideals and beliefs of the present is constant and overwhelming. It allows for a sense of moral clarity and feels more enlightened. But it's actually just easier than trying to understand how things felt when they originally occurred.

Record sales don't matter when the people who bought the records are dead and gone.

The Bible is the only book that hangs its entire credibility on its ability to write history in advance, without error.

If you want to know what time it is on God's clock, look at Israel. Understand Israel—it's the only nation that has its origin, history, ups and downs, and destiny all written out in advance for the diligent.

Earlier, in Hour 9, we examined Daniel 9 where the angel Gabriel told Daniel that from the commandment to restore and rebuild Jerusalem unto Messiah the King would be 173,880 days, sixty-nine weeks of 360-day years. If you do the arithmetic, you'll discover that the number of days between the Decree of Artaxerxes Longimanus on March 12, 445 B.C., to the triumphal entry which happened on April 6, A.D. 32, is precisely 173,880 days.

It took only forty hours to get Israel out of Egypt—the Passover. But it took forty years to get Egypt out of Israel.

There are only patterns, patterns on top of patterns, patterns that affect other patterns. Patterns hidden by patterns. Patterns within patterns. If you watch close, history does nothing but repeat itself. What we call chaos is just patterns we haven't recognized. What we call random is just patterns we can't decipher. what we can't understand we call nonsense. What we can't read we call gibberish. There is no free will. There are no variables.

Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950's. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

What's burning down is a re-creation of a period revival house patterned after a copy of a copy of a copy of a mock Tudor big manor house. It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?