Quotes About History

You and I are cobbled out of carbon cells that were once other things entirely. We could have a carbon cell in one of our elbows that was once part of a trilobite's tail. Or a cell from Atilla the Hun's moustache in our eye. Or an ancient lotus petal in our tonsils.

Henry figured that the reason the Cheyenne had always ridden Appaloosas into battle was because by the time the men got there, they were so angry with the horses they were ready to kill everything.

In the United States of 1850, the Industrial Revolution had amped up labor to an astonishing all-time high of 3,650 hours, based on seventy-hour weeks and fifty-two weeks per year.

History is a ghost story. My own childhood has passed into history, and the ghosts I find there are the ghosts of Heroes and dragons and Berserks and witches, and it has become fashionable not to believe in these things anymore. But I believe, for I was there.

The past has a way of catching up with you.

History, you see, is like the interlocking wheels turning in a ticking-thing. Something unexpected happens, some sort of hiccup ... the wheels are jogged... and then they set off again, beating out the time in a new pattern.

Stories come from somewhere, said the witch. The past haunts the present in more ways than we realise.

Det är en sak att stiga i land på en ny kontinent under pompa och ståt, från ett stort och tungt beväpnat fartyg, med gåvor och bytesvaror och god mat. Att däremot anlända mer eller mindre naken, obeväpnad, försvarslös och utan minsta gåva, är en helt annan sak, nåt som alla stackars flyktingar genom historien kan intyga.

Inés de Bobadilla, Cuba's first woman governor

The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.

I was six years old when Congress gave women the right to vote. I've been waiting for you ever since.

Napoli è la più misteriosa città d'Europa, è la sola città del mondo antico che non sia perita come Ilio, come Ninive, come Babilonia. È la sola città del mondo che non è affondata nell'immane naufragio della civiltà antica. Napoli è una Pompei che non è stata mai sepolta. Non è una città: è un mondo.

I felt entangled now: this March, this South, this war, history. History could not possibly let the South get away with slavery; history would not possibly let us get away with what we were doing to the South. Somehow or other, we'd both have to pay.

She went on and on, until Jeff had a sense of family spreading out around them endlessly, and only an hour later, when she was lost in reminiscences, did he understand that the names she mentioned, the people she spoke of, were most of them long ago dead. The family spread not out and around, but back, back into time.

A rune for the very bored: when very bored say to yourself: It was during the next twenty minutes that there occurred one of those tiny incidents which revolutionizes the whole course of our life and alter the face of history. Truly we are the playthings of enormous fates.

The voice of passion is better than the voice of reason. The passionless cannot change history.

The history of my stupidity would fill many volumes.

Men fight for liberty and win it with hard knocks. Their children, brought up easy, let it slip away again, poor fools. And their grandchildren are once more slaves.

Things men have made with wakened hands, and put soft life into are awake through years with transferred touch, and go on glowing for long years. And for this reason, some old things are lovely warm still with the life of forgotten men who made them.

She was old; millions of years old, she felt.

There was a certain pathos. The wood still had some of the mystery of wild, old England; but Sir Geoffrey's cuttings during the war had given it a blow. How still the trees were, with their crinkly, innumerable twigs against the sky, and their grey, obstinate trunks rising from the brown bracken! How safely the birds flitted among them! And once there had been deer, and archers, and monks padding along on asses. The place remembered, still remembered.

The Italians are called Children of the Sun. They might better be called Children of the Shadow. Their souls are dark and nocturnal.

This is history. One England blots out another. The mines had made the halls wealthy. Now they were blotting them out, as they had already blotted out the cottages. The industrial England blots out the agricultural England. One meaning blots out another. The new England blots out the old England. And the continuity is not organic, but mechanical.

Si dice che nè i romani nè i fenici, i greci o gli arabi abbiano mai sottomesso la Sardegna. È fuori; fuori dal circuito della civiltà.