Quotes About History

For sure, they don't teach you this in history class, but in colonial times, the person who got left in the stocks overnight was nothing less than fair game for everybody to nail. Men or women, anybody bent over had no way of knowing who was doing the ram job, and this was the real reason you never wanted to end up here unless you had a family member or a friend who'd stand with you the whole time. To protect you. To watch your ass, for real.

Also consider that someday, when you're dead and rotted, kids with their baby teeth will sit in their time-geography class and laugh about how stupid you were.

History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

This is the worst problem with living history museums. They always leave the best parts out. Like typhus. And opium. And scarlet letters. Shunning. Witch-burning.

You know that old phrase 'Those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it'? Well, I think those who remember the past are even worse off.

This isn't about guilt or innocence, he says. The dinosaurs weren't morally good or bad, but they're all dead.

Where would Jesus be if no one had written the gospels?

Yes, I kidnapped that Lindberg baby.

This is our world now, and those ancient people are dead.

Some little part of themselves for someone in the future to discover. Maybe a thought. We were here. We built this. A reminder.

Because supposedly those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

Where would Jesus be if no one ever wrote the gospels?

We all want to explain ourselves. Nobody wants to be forgotten.

Typhoid Mary or Ted Bundy or Sharon Tate. History is nothing except monsters or victims. Or witnesses.

Looming visage noble American colonel. Courageous, renown of history, Colonel Sanders, image forever accompanied odor of sacrificial meat. Eternal flame offering wind savory perfume roasted flesh.

La historia no es más que una sucesión de monstruos o de víctimas. O de testigos.

All these mystics, throughout history, all over the world, they all found their way to enlightenment by physical suffering.

Throughout history the most powerful rulers have been sex maniacs. And he asks, does their sex appetite come from having power, or does their will for power come from their sex appetite?

The first week I was here, a girl got canned for humming an Erasure song while she was churning butter. It's like, yeah, Erasure is historic, but not historic enough.

Nobody used to look at George Washington, with his wooden teeth, in his powdered wig, and say, Fashion Victim.

It's a hundred generations removed from anything original, but the truth is aren't we all?

Godless, 'we had no war.' Until God set us to fight each other, for the rest of human history.

For most of human history, Leonard says, people have perceived of Hell as a sort of inpatient clinic where we go to kick our addiction to life.

if history remembered him as an idiot, well, he was only one among billions of people. History could spare one man. All men are doomed to spend most of their existence among the dead.