Quotes About History

The man who conquered Ireland could be a match for the man who did not conquer Egypt.

he (Cornwallis) was as keen-eyed as ever, discoursing upon his campaigning days in America twenty years before, and most interestingly upon the subject of Washington, whom he regarded as a most overrated commander, although a man of estimable personal qualities.

Judged by the law of England, I know this crime entails upon me the penalty of death but the history of Ireland explains that crime and justifies it.

But it is also true that things that begin in Kansas—the Civil War, Prohibition, Populism, Pizza Hut—have a historical tendency to go national. Maybe Kansas, instead of being a laughingstock, is actually in the vanguard. Maybe what has happened there points the way in which all our public policy debates are heading. Maybe someday soon the political choices of Americans everywhere will be whittled down to the two factions of the Republican Party.

Labor unions are on the wane today, as everyone knows, down to 9 percent of the private-sector workforce from a high water mark of 38 percent in the fifties.

Optimists are usually wrong. But all the great change in history, positive change, was done by optimists.

The pyramids themselves, doting with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.

Learning hath gained most by those books by which the printers have lost.

History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or gray hairs; privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof.

Throughout its history, the church has discovered that when it goes to the Scripture in openness and trust, it finds itself uniquely addressed there by God and its identity as the people of God shaped by that encounter.

Each in his narrow cell forever laid,The rude forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

To scatter plenty o'er a smiling land,And read their hist'ry in a nation's eyes.

It is important to keep old things, he insisted, because it was through them alone that new things could be judged.

Extinguished theologians lie about the cradle of every science as the strangled snakes beside that of Hercules; and history records that whenever science and orthodoxy have been fairly opposed, the latter has been forced to retire from the lists, bleeding and crushed if not annihilated; scotched, if not slain.

Only a man harrowing clodsIn a slow silent walkWith an old horse that stumbles and nodsHalf asleep as they stalk.Only thin smoke without flameFrom the heaps of couch grass:Yet this will go onward the sameThough dynasties pass.Yonder a maid and her wightCome whispering by;War's annals will cloud into nightEre their story die.

The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim. Who can say of a particular sea that it is old? Distilled by the sun, kneaded by the moon, it is renewed in a year, in a day, or in an hour. The sea changed, the fields changed, the rivers, the villages, and the people changed, yet Egdon remained.

We two kept house, the Past and I,The Past and I;Through all my tasks it hovered nigh,Leaving me never alone.

Ah, no; the years, the years;Down their chiseled names the raindrop plows.

They spoke very little of their mutual feeling; pretty phrases and warm expressions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.

The beauty or ugliness of a character lay not only in its achievements, but in its aims and impulses; its true history lay, not among things done, but among things willed.

Seven cities warr'd for Homer being dead,Who living had no roof to shroud his head.

I was at the famous Shiva temple of Brihadishwari in Tanjore,

All that was worth handing on died with them; the rest, they put into their books.8

But I have forgotten to tell you how I came into the world, and am telling you my father's story instead of my own. You seem to like hearing about it though, and you can't understand one without the other.