Quotes About History

The most beautiful antiques are not found in stores.

A statistician made a few calculations and discovered that since the birth of our nation more lives had been lost in celebrating independence than in winning it.

Science is the record of dead religions.

Historically, the common form of revolution has been a not-too-efficient despotism which is overthrown by another non-too-efficient despotism with little or no effect on the public good. Indeed, except for the change in the names of the ruling circles, it would be hard to distinguish one from the other.

On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.

We are the United States of Amnesia, we learn nothing because we remember nothing.

Monotheism is easily the greatest disaster to befall the human race.

And when the demons came out of the past, they went into man…

He says that we missed our chance to explain communism with all its horrors and labor camps and now a whole generation just takes it as a "lifestyle".

Wie tief im Menschen leben jede jener Fabeln: wurzelt, auf welche die großen alten Werke gebaut sind.

the roasted-paper smell of very old books, and the seared ink of photocopied pages.

The past is our only real possession in life. It is the one piece of property of which time cannot deprive us; it is our own in a way that nothing else in life is. In a word, we are our past; we do not cling to it, it clings to us.

History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally - has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.

As Grace recounts in the pages that follow, Detroit's history is embedded with struggles that expose the contradictions inherent in the golden age. However, the city's deep despair further reminds us that, over the past four decades, the U.S. public has largely evaded responsibility for confronting the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism.

Taiwan was part of China.

The Schuylers were one of the few families in those

Don't ever fancy, no matter how hard a thing you have to go through, that your experience is unique. This old world has been going on a good many hundred years, and there are precious few situations that haven't happened over and over again. Cheer up, child; that's a model letter, and you're a good little sport!

whatever tongue we speak the old ghost asserts itself in dusky echoes

I checked out the two Edith Wharton books I had just returned because I'd read them so long ago and they are more apropos now than ever. They were The House of Mirth and The Children, which is about how life in the United States in New York changed in twenty-seven years fifty years ago. ("Wants")

When asked his opinion of the French Revolution, Chinese Premier Zhou En-Lai in the 1950s famously remarked, "It's too early to tell.

Indeed, the Catholic Church insisted on maintaining Latin as the sole liturgical language until the twentieth century—even though the New Testament had originally been written in Greek.)

If there was never any Islam, if there was never a prophet Muhammad, that the relationship between the west and the middle east today would probably not be all that different.

You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.

Human history has become too much a matter of dogma taught by 'professionals' in ivory towers as though it's all fact. Actually, much of human history is up for grabs. The further back you go, the more that the history that's taught in the schools and universities begins to look like some kind of faerie story.