Quotes About History

No, the problem at Göbekli Tepe is the pristine, sudden appearance, like Athena springing full-grown and fully armed from the brow of Zeus, of what appears to be an already seasoned civilization so accomplished that it "invents" both agriculture and monumental architecture at the apparent moment of its birth.

We truly are a species with amnesia. We have forgotten a very important part of our story.

Everything we've been taught about the origins of civilization may be wrong," says Danny Hilman Natawidjaja, PhD, senior geologist with the Research Center for Geotechnology at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences.

Graham Hancock

At six thousand or more years older than the stone circles of Stonehenge, the megaliths of Göbekli Tepe, like the deeply buried megaliths of Gunung Padang, mean that the timeline of history taught in our schools and universities for the best part of the last hundred years can no longer stand. It is beginning to look as though civilization, as I argued in my controversial 1995 bestseller Fingerprints of the Gods, is indeed much older and much more mysterious than we thought.

Language aren't created in a day; some have evolved over hundreds, even thousands of years, and are still evolving. The user of any language must constantly invent to adapt to fresh circumstances, and when invention flags they must borrow.

Somewhere, all the people we have loved and lost are still among us, in the house that we call history.

The way to avoid the tragedies of the past is not to let them happen to begin with.

I was there the day that Horus fell.

It is the folly of men to believe that they are great players on the stage of history, that their actions might affect the grand procession that is the pasage of time.

The paysans had no flags or written histories, but they expressed their local patriotism in much the same way as nations: by denigrating their neighbours and celebrating their own nobility.

It is one of the joys of studying history that first impressions are always wrong. Truth is proverbially stranger than fiction, but only because no guiding mind has contrived to make it credible.

Further west, on the edge of the Iraty forest, a naked, hairy man who could run like a deer, and who was later thought to be the remnant of a Neanderthal colony, was spotted several times in 1774, indulging in his favourite pastime: scattering flocks of sheep. On the last occasion, when the shepherds tried to catch him, he ran away, giggling, and was never seen again.

MEN AND WOMEN who did almost nothing for a large part of the year tend not to figure prominently in history books. Studies and museums naturally highlight enterprise and undervalue the art of remaining idle for months on end.

That's the way it is: life includes a lot of empty space. We are one-tenth living tissue, nine-tenths water; life is one-tenth Here and Now, nine-tenths a history lesson. For most of the time the Here and Now is neither now nor here.

Why is it that every so often history demands a bloodbath, a holocaust, an Armageddon? And why is it that every time the time before has taught us nothing?

What is a history teacher? He's someone who teaches mistakes.

There are no compasses for journeying in time.

But I have not brought history with me this evening (history is a thin garment, easily punctured by a knife blade called Now). I have brought my fear.

A strange thing is memory, and hope one looks backward, and the other forward one is of today, the other of tomorrow. Memory is history recorded in our brain, memory is a painter, it paints pictures of the past and of the day.

As Palmer observes: "Plato warned in his Republic that changes in the modes and rhythms of popular music inevitably lead to changes in society at large,"[100] and this originary moment of rock and roll seems to be one of the clearest cases in musical history of a fundamentally new rhythmic, and thus affective, mode catalyzing an equally fundamental cultural transformation.

In AD 57 in the city of Corinth, the Apostle Paul wrote the greatest book ever penned in human history: his letter to the Roman church.

Pelagius (c. AD 360–418) later espoused the view that we could earn salvation by our works, which Augustine (AD 354–430) and the church rightly deemed a heresy.

Every creature born in the flesh carried the genes of an ancestor who had lived through the most savage punishment this would could inflict.