Quotes About History

One literally became a number: dead or alive—that was unimportant; the life of a "number" was completely irrelevant. What stood behind that number and that life mattered even less; the date, the history, the name of the man.

La historia de ese libro es sorprendente y apasionante. Apareció por primera vez en 1946 con el título Ein Psychologe erlebt das Konzentrationslager (Un psicólogo en un campo de concentración).

los autores coinciden en señalar que el número de no-judíos muertos es superior al de los judíos

It is not true that the deed is irretrievably lost in the past, but rather that it is indelibly stamped in the past!

The Americans are people of extremes, prone to fits of rage and self-destructiveness, but also in possession of an inner strength that no one in history has been able to overcome.

Agnosco veteris vestigia flammae.

Remo cum fratre Quirinus

At puer Ascanius, cui nunc cognomen Iulo additur,---Ilus erat, dum res stetit Ilia regno,--- triginta magnos volvendis mensibus orbis imperio explebit, regnumque ab sede Lavini transferet, et longam multa vi muniet Albam.

Atina potens Tiburque superbum, Ardea Crustumerique et turrigerae Antemnae.

Troy has fallen—and fallen let her stay— with the very name of Troy!

Turne, tot incassum fusos patiere labores et tua Dardaniis transcribi sceptra colonis?

Women have sat indoors all these millions of years, so that by this time the very walls are permeated by their creative force, which has, indeed, so overcharged the capacity of bricks and mortar that it must needs harness itself to pens and brushes and business and politics.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

For most of history, anonymous was a woman.

If woman had no existence save in the fiction written by men, one would imagine her a person of the utmost importance (...); as great as a man, some think even greater. But this is woman in fiction. In fact, as Professor Trevelyan points out [in his History of England ], she was locked up, beaten and flung about the room.

for women live much more in the past...they attach themselves to places;

An immense pressure is on me. I cannot move without dislodging the weight of centuries.

Women's rights, that antediluvian topic.

It is permissible even for a dying hero to think before he dies how men will speak of him hereafter. His fame lasts perhaps two thousand years. And what are two thousand years? (asked Mr Ramsay ironically, staring at the hedge). What, indeed, if you look from a mountain top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

History is too much about wars; biography too much about great men.

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.

Here have lived for more centuries than I can count, the obscure generations of my own obscure family. Not one of these Richards, Johns, Annes, Elizabeths have left a token of himself behind him, yet all, working together with their spades and their needles, their love-making and their child-bearing have left this. -Viginia Woolf

Some historians say that when the Carthaginians landed in Spain the common soldiers shouted with one accord "Span! Span!"—for rabbits darted from every scrub, from every bush. The land was alive with rabbits. And Span in the Carthaginian tongue signifies Rabbit. Thus the land was called Hispania, or Rabbit-land, and the dogs, which were almost instantly perceived in full pursuit of the rabbits, were called Spaniels or rabbit dogs.

Here is Lady Winchilsea, for example, I thought, taking down her poems. She was born in the year 1661; she was noble both by birth and by marriage; she was childless; she wrote poetry, and one has only to open her poetry to find her bursting out in indignation against the position of women: