Quotes About History

The past is but the beginning of a beginning.

Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.

When the history of civilization is written, it will be a biological history and Margaret Sanger will be its heroine.

Human history in essence is the history of ideas.

We are living in 1937, and our universities, I suggest, are not half-way out of the fifteenth century. We have made hardly any changes in our conception of university organization, education, graduation, for a century - for several centuries.

The crisis of yesterday is the joke of tomorrow.

The past is but the past of a beginning.

Marrying an old bachelor is like buying second-hand furniture.

In phase space the complete state of knowledge about a dynamical system at a single instant in time collapses to a point. That point is the dynamical system—at that instant. At the next instant, though, the system will have changed, ever so slightly, and so the point moves. The history of the system time can be charted by the moving point, tracing its orbit through phase space with the passage of time.

It is fitting that history attached Morse's name to his code, more than to his device.

What we call the past is built on bits. —John Archibald Wheeler

So by 1880, four years after Bell conveyed the words "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you," and three years after the first pair of telephones rented for twenty dollars, more than sixty thousand telephones were in use in the United States.

Order in chaos. It was science's oldest cliché. The idea of hidden unity and common underlying form in nature had an intrinsic appeal, and it had an unfortunate history of inspiring pseudoscientists and cranks. When Feigenbaum came to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1974, a year shy of his thirtieth birthday, he knew that if physicists were to make something of the idea now, they would need a practical framework, a way to turn ideas into calculations.

The library remains a sacred place for secular folk [What Libraries Can (Still) Do, The New York Review Daily, October 26, 2015].

Time is a feature of creation, and the creator remains apart from it, transcendent over it. Does that mean that all our mortal time and history is, for God, a mere instant—complete and entire? For God outside of time, God in eternity, time does not pass; events do not occur step by step; cause and effect are meaningless. He is not one-thing-after-another, but all-at-once. His "now" encompasses all time. Creation is a tapestry, or an Einsteinian block universe.

To spell (from an old Germanic word) first meant to speak or to utter. Then it meant to read, slowly, letter by letter. Then, by extension, just around Cawdrey's time, it meant to write words letter by letter. The last was a somewhat poetic usage. "Spell Eva back and Ave shall you find," wrote

If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others.

If human power in history—among races, nations, and other collectives as well as individuals—is self-interested power, then "the revelation of divine goodness in history" must be weak and not strong.

What do those kids expect to do with that biscuit eater?" Ames laughed. ''You know how boys are. I'll bet this is the first time in history a colored boy and a white boy ever had a joint entry in a field trial. They get riled if anybody calls him a biscuit eater.

It's a seminal moment in the history of Germany and Europe. Stopping at the Elbe is not a normal military-political decision; it's one dictated by higher powers. Crossing the Rhine is fine; but the Elbe marks the end of reasonable ambition.

Anyone who thinks of the Germans as a naturally bellicose people should recall that Prussia-Germany was the only one of the continental powers in the run-up to 1914 whose elite seriously feared that if they had their war, their people might refuse to fight it.

the success of Egyptian surgery in setting broken bones is very fully demonstrated in the large number of well-joined fractures found in the ancient skeletons.

the first physician who is known to have counted the pulse, Herophilos of Alexandria (born 300 B.C.), lived in Egypt.

the distinction between nerves and vessels was not demonstrated until the Third Century B.C., when it was made clear by Erasistratos.