Quotes About History

Increase Mather, President of Harvard University, in his treatise on Remarkable Providences, insists that the smell of herbs alarms the Devil and that medicine expels him. Such beliefs have probably even now not wholly disappeared from among us.

The world was already growing old, and everywhere men were fondly dwelling on her faraway youth.

These two unions [of Egypt], the earliest great national organizations of men in history, brought before the minds of men an imposing fabric of the state which at length made a profound impression on religion. The forms of the state began to pass over into the world of the gods, and an important god would be called a king.

The two of us stood gazing at the gleaming rows without any idea that it was nearly all useless and that the days of the old medicines were nearly over. Soon they would be hustled into oblivion by the headlong rush of the new discoveries and they would never return.

And as I methodically trimmed the overgrown nails, wrathful bubbles escaped on either side of the bandage along with his splutterings. If dogs could swear I was getting the biggest cursing in history. I

But that was not all. He foresaw a time when men, exultant in the technique of homicide, would rage so hotly over the world that every precious thing would be in danger, every book and picture and harmony, every treasure garnered through two millenniums, the small, the delicate, the defenseless—all would be lost like the lost books of Livy, or wrecked as the English wrecked the Summer Palace in Pekin.

I often think that the Romans were fortunate; their civilization reached as far as hot baths without touching the fatal knowledge of machinery.

There can be no war to end wars, because all wars begin other wars. There can be no such thing as a war to save democracy, because all wars destroy democracy. There could have been a peace to save what was left of democracy, but the chance of that came and went in 1919—the saddest year in all the martyrdom of man.

Occasionally throughout the ages, the clouds of history show a rift and through it the sun of human betterment shines out for a few deceptive moments over a limited area.

1916…. The Somme Battle. Twenty-three names read out one Sunday evening.

I was also puzzled by the vast number of people in history who were put to death because they would not change their religion; indeed, the entire fuss about religion throughout history was inexplicable to a boy

Goodbye, Mr. Chips!' was first submitted by James Hilton to the British Weekly in 1933, but it came to prominence when it was printed as the leading article of The Atlantic in April 1934.

Sad! But So disrespectful to the people who made this great country what it is" "You may remove all the works of art you want and even those statues but the memory and the history will still survive even though you throw a baby tantrum...You are still a no count individual until you grow up...If the shoe fits, wear it proudly..

You may remove all the works of art you want and even those statues of which tax dollars paid for by your parents and grand parents. but the memory and the history will still survive even though you throw a baby tantrum...Your parents and grand parents are more important then your little mouse tantrum. You are still of a no count individual until you grow up...If the shoe fits, wear it proudly..??

Seriously. If the cave-man had known how to laugh, history would have been different.

The past is a place of learning, not a place of living.

Jung once observed that we cannot grow up until we can see our parents as other adults, special to our biography certainly, wounded perhaps, but most of all simply other people who did or did not take on the largeness of their own journey. We have our own journey, for sure, and that is large enough to take us beyond our personal history toward our full potential.

It is of paramount importance that our spirituality be validated or confirmed by fidelity to our personal experience. A spiritual tradition that is only received from history or from family makes no real difference in a person's life, for he or she is living by conditioned reflexive response. Only what is experientially true is worthy of a mature spirituality.

Folk wisdom observes that lovers are fools, lovers are blind; we also speak of a folie a deux because in this mutually projective state, the person is acting not out of a conscious relationship to reality, but out of the archaic and often overwhelming power of personal history.

As you are now so once were we.

History ... is a nightmare from which I am trying to wake.

Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

Force, hatred, history, all that. That's not life for men and women, insult and hatred. And everybody knows that it's the very opposite of that that is really life.... Love, says Bloom. I mean the opposite of hatred.

Gone too from the world, Averroes and Moses Maimonides