Quotes About History

The one charm about the past is that it is the past. But women never know when the curtain has fallen.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is usually Judas who writes the biography.

The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it.

Religions die when they are proved to be true. Science is the record of dead religions.

My dear Arthur, I never talk scandal. I only talk gossip. What is the difference between scandal and gossip? Oh! Gossip is charming! History is merely gossip. But scandal is gossip made tedious by morality.

To give an accurate description of what has never occurred is not merely the proper occupation of the historian, but the inalienable privilege of any man of parts and culture.

MISS PRISM Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.

There is a fatality about all physical and intellectual distinction, the sort of fatality that seems to dog through history the faltering steps of kings. It is better not to be different from one's fellows. The ugly and the stupid have the best of it in this world. They can sit at their ease and gape at the play. If they know nothing of victory, they are at least spared the knowledge of defeat. They live as we all should live, undisturbed, indifferent, and without disquiet.

Fixed fortifications are monuments to man's stupidity: General George S. Patton.

It's a vast mystery to me, like it is to most New Yorkers, how this ugly lovely town became my lovely ugly town, this gorgeous rubbish heap of a place, this city of the timeless Now, with little of the style of Paris, little of the beauty of Rome, little of the history of London, and not even much of the dear dirty dereliction of my hometown, Dublin. (from My First New York)

The Greek word clepsydra, given to ancient water clocks, comes from the amalgamation of the Greek words for water and to steal.

After Schächter's final performance, Eichmann is reported to have said: Those crazy Jews, singing their own requiem.

That's what sons do: write to their mothers about recall, tell themselves about the past until they come to realize that they are the past.

I had always hated Nixon, not just for obvious reasons, but it seemed to me that he had learned not only to destroy what was left behind, but also to poison what was to come.

Known to Israelis as the city of Akko. Known to Palestinians still as Akka. Known beyond Israel and Palestine as Acre: a mosaic town with a low skyline of mosque and flat roof and synagogue, a town of bells and loudspeakers and muezzin calls, where the warm-water wind retreats the tongue and sneaks multiple sounds into the throat: Acre, Akko, Akka.

We, the Palestinians, became the victims of the victims

that all good math had come from the Arabs, everyone knew that.

Study the past to define the future

Tzu-chang[21] asked whether we can know what is to be ten generations hence. The Master said, The Yin[22] took over the manners of the Hsia; the harm and the good that they did them can be known. The Chou took over the manners of the Yin; the harm and the good that they did them can be known. And we may know what shall be, even an hundred generations hence, whoever follows Chou.

If King Harold had had swans on his side, England would still be Saxon.

Virginia was working in the garden, and her husband Leonard called out for her to come inside, that Hitler was just about to speak on the radio. Virginia refused. "I am planting irises," she said, "and they will be here long after Hitler is gone." And they are. You can go see the irises at their house, still blooming.

Then why does every sentence beginning 'We need to talk' end in disaster? Our whole evolutionary history has been about trying to stop information from getting communicated—camouflage, protective coloration, that ink that squids squirt, encrypted passwords, corporate secrets, lying. Especially lying. If people really wanted to communicate, they'd tell the truth, but they don't.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition." —Monty Python's Flying Circus

History was full of divergence points nobody could get anywhere near—from Archduke Ferdinand's assassination to the battle of Trafalgar. Events so critical and so volatile that the introduction of a single variable—such as a time traveler—could change the outcome. And alter the entire course of history.