Quotes About History

The human race has always produced a vast surplus of human beings and of wealth, and it has used up almost all of it either on stupid monuments like the pyramids or on brutal, bloody, pointless wars. We want you to unite the world so that this waste can finally stop.

I'm saying that America shaped itself with institutions so strong that it could survive corruption, stupidity, vanity, ambition, recklessness, and even insanity in its chief executive.

All history is the same thing over and over...The technology may change, but the behavior is still human. We are who we are. Individuals learn, grow up, get better, wiser, stronger, healthier, kinder—or the opposite. As a group, though, we keep inventing the same behaviors. Some work, some don't.

What if the first homo sapiens had felt that way? We'd all still be neanderthals, and when the Buggers came they would have blasted us all to bits and that would be that." "We didn't evolve from neanderthals," said Bean. "Well, it's a good thing we have that little fact squared away," said Petra.

You don't represent all humankind. You're about to fight a war with other humans. So how can you say that our wars are evil and your wars are good?' Surely Pizarro, for all his shortcomings, had an easier time of it with Atahualpa

In our wars with the west," said Lankowski, "we learned to bury everything that we did not want blown up. Individually-targeted bombs were first tested on Arabs, did you know that? The archives are full of pictures of exploding Arabs.

Spread, widen, flatten, fade. Like all waves. Like all shocks. A note in the history books. A few biographies. Revisionist biographies a generation later. Encyclopedia entries. Notes at the end of translations of his books. That is the stillness into which all great lives fade.

But it could wait until they got back. That was the nice thing about the past—it stayed right where you put it until you needed to pick it up again.

Living men forget the lessons of the past. But the ancestors never forget.

The Russians stopped being the bad guys back in the twentieth century!

History is an omelet. The eggs are already broken.

Is there something in women that makes us long to be humbled? Or is it something in human beings, that when we are overmastered, we rejoice in our subjection? That would explain a lot of history.

History is a chaotic system. The details can shift endlessly, but the overall shape remains constant. Make a small change in the past, and it changes enough details in the present that we would not have come together at exactly this place and time to watch exactly this scene. And yet the great movements of history would be largely unchanged.

What's happening now is what happened before, and often what's going to happen again sometime or other

The world is changed because you are made of ivory and gold. The curves of your lips rewrite history.

America is the only country that went from barbarism to decadence without civilization in between.

Disobedience, in the eyes of any one who has read history, is man's original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

No man is rich enough to buy back his past.

The one charm about the past is that it is the past.

Memory is the diary we all carry about with us.

America has never quite forgiven Europe for having been discovered somewhat earlier in history than itself.

Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.

Perhaps, after all, America never has been discovered. I myself would say that it had merely been detected.

America had often been discovered before Columbus, but it had always been hushed up.