Quotes About History

It wasn't fate, it wasn't destiny–there was no Will of God, no Force of History to absolve us. It grew out of who we were: the lies we'd told, and would keep on telling.

History can't harm you; the "chance" of having survived the last x minutes is one hundred per cent, once you've done it. As the unknowable future becomes the unchangeable past, risk must collapse into certainty, one way or another.

And by that remarkable fact there hangs . . . a story. This ambiguity was not a historical accident; it was, in fact, the whole point of the American founding. An adequate history of Christianity and America ought to be built around the story of this ambiguity. And quite a story it is. We might call it the "cooperative founding" story, because Christianity and its spiritual enemies created America together.

All told, U.S. allies in Central America during Reagan's two terms killed over 300,000 people, tortured hundreds of thousands, and drove millions into exile.

IT WOULD BE tempting to read the story of Fordlandia and Belterra as a parable of arrogance

Many historians still consider Jackson's two terms (1829–1837) the fulfillment of the promise of the American Revolution's anti-aristocratic aspirations, a moment of boisterous egalitarianism in which restless white workers armed with the vote became a political force.21 "A

It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery. But consider these figures: of the known 10,148,288 Africans put on slave ships bound for the Americas between 1514 and 1866 (of a total historians estimate to be at least 12,500,000), more than half, 5,131,385, were embarked after July 4, 1776.

Never before in history could so many white men consider themselves so free. Jacksonian settlers moved across the frontier, continuing to win a greater liberty by putting down people of color, and then continuing to define their liberty in opposition to the people of color they put down.

It's the same way people have always felt. Since the days we lived in caves and feared the violence of nature and then dreamed up the idea of gods and feared their anger and then joined together in groups and came to fear each other.

Every life holds an epic tale, even if no one alive remembers it.

My feeling is, the Pilgrims were asked to leave England. England was never funner than when the Pilgrims split, right? The people of England got a little tired of these dour, right-winged conservative psycho-Christians wearing all black, bumming people out, confusing everyone by wearing buckles on... their heads. "Is that tight enough for you, Cotton?" "Yea, verily.

Essential Christianity is a definable concept. A thread of its demonstrable presence can be pinpointed in every generation from the time of Christ to the present. This is the fundamental backdrop for church history. If not, then Jesus lied. …teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matthew 28:20)

Most of us, even in this digital age, know what a grandfather clock is – but do you know how they got their name? They were once known as long-case clocks, but in 1876 American songwriter Henry Clay Work wrote the song that would give birth to the name that we know them by today: "My Grandfather's Clock".

Roman history is like astronomy in that respect. New experiments cannot be carried out. But a vast mass of distant and ancient phenomena can be observed through tiny packets of residual data, and the forces and cataclysmic events that formed the observable universe can be reconstructed.

History, as Kennan had observed, was "the common refuge of those who find themselves helpless in the face of the present."17

Every dollar has a story to tell," Vonn Carp in Dollarapalooza.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.

It is, I claim, nonsense to say that it does not matter which individual man acted as the nucleus for the change. It is precisely this that makes history unpredictable into the future.

The past was a jigsaw puzzle and you never had all the pieces.

The universe of artifacts was a human one.

including Jacques Hillairet's two-volume Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, a classic that tells the history of every street in Paris. In some cases the history is just a line or two, but more often the entries are detailed, run along for several pages, and are illustrated with archival photographs and drawings.

It's forgiveness that makes us what we are. Without forgiveness, our species would've annihilated itself in endless retributions. Without forgiveness, there would be no history. Without that hope, there would be no art, for every work of art is in some way an act of forgiveness. Without that dream, there would be no love, for every act of love is in some way a promise to forgive. We live on because we can love, and we love because we can forgive.

It would be an irony of history, or another lesson about the unintended consequences about using force, that [Najibullah's] regime would outlive the Soviet Union that was convinced it had a duty to teach the world how to think and live.

Where I'm from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren't true... we call it history.