Quotes About History

This is the Victorian era, she said. Women didn't have to make sense.

We weren't even a halfway decent detectin' team. We hadn't solved the case. The case had been solved in spite of us. Worse, we had been such an impediment, we'd had to be packed off out of the way before the course of history could correct itself. This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but an elopement.

Because Dunworthy is not blinking against the fatal sunlight of the last morning, but into the gloom of that first afternoon, looking in the great west doors of St. Paul's at what is, like Langby, like all of it, every moment, in us, saved forever.

How much of an effect on history can an animal have? A big one. Look at Alexander the Great's horse Bucephalus, and "the little gentleman in the black fur coat" who'd killed King William the Third when his horse stepped in the mole's front door. And Richard the Third standing on the field at Bosworth and shouting, "My kingdom for a horse!

And Lady Jane Grey was seventeen when she was beheaded," Mr. Dunworthy said

He stepped forward and grasped the staircase's railing, looked up at her earnestly. Is it a comedy or a tragedy? 'He doesn't mean the war,' she thought. 'He's talking about all of it - our lives and history and Shakespear. And the continuum. She smiled down at him. A comedy, my lord.

Perhaps that's what's wrong with our time, Mr. Dunworthy, it was founded by Maisry and the bishop's envoy and Sir Bloet. And all the people who stayed and tried to help, like Roche, caught the plague and died.

Grandmother. Agnes had not said anything like "grandmother." The word hadn't even existed until the eighteenth century

The past and the future are both part of a single continuum

He was a prisoner to the calendar, he realised, as we all were. He thought in little boxes that were to be ticked off and filled with things to do. Almost every day he thought back to what he had been doing ten years ago, twenty years ago, further. He lived in the past, by his diary. He was a history man, his head full of dead leaves. It was a form of reassurance, he knew. There were too many roads into the future and he didn't like not having a map for it. (Wait)

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment in history or nothing happens.

In history there are no control groups. There is no one to tell us what might have been. We weep over the might have been, but there is no might have been. There never was. It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I don't believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God--who knows all that can be known--seems powerless to change.

He thought that in the history of the world it might even be that there was more punishment than crime but he took small comfort from it.

The things I believed in dont exist any more. It's foolish to pretend that they do. Western Civilization finally went up in smoke in the chimneys at Dachau but I was too infatuated to see it. I see it now.

Each memory recalled must do some violence to its origins.

Every man's death is a standing in for every other. And since death comes to all there is no way to abate the fear of it except to love that man who stands for us. We are not waiting for his history to be written. He passed here long ago. That man who is all men and who stands in the dock for us until our own time come and we must stand for him. Do you love him, that man? Will you honor the path he has taken? Will you listen to his tale?

Mr Suttree in what year did your greatuncle Jeffrey pass away? It was in 1884. Did he die by natural causes? No sir. And what were the circumstances surrounding his death? He was taking part in a public function when the platform gave way. Our information is that he was hanged for a homicide.

History is a collection of paper. A few fading recollections. After a while what is not written never happened.

The passing of armies and the passing of sands in the desert are one.

I feel old, Squire. Every conversation is about the past.

Scars have the strange power to remind us that our past is real. The events that cause them can never be forgotten, can they?

The world of our fathers resides within us. Ten thousand generations and more. A form without a history has no power to perpetuate itself. What has no past can have no future.

Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right.

The mother dead these fourteen years did incubate in her own bosom the creature who would carry her off. The father never speaks her name, the child does not know it. He has a sister in this world that he will not see again. He watches, pale and unwashed. He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man.