Quotes About History

You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933...Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

And who is the hero of that story? Who slew the dragon [totalitarianism]? Yes, it was the ordinary man, the taxpayer, the grunt who fought and won the wars. Yes, it was America and its allies. Yes, it was the great leaders: FDR, de Gaulle, Adenauer, Truman, John Paul II, Thatcher, Reagan. But above all, victory required one man without whom the fight would have been lost at the beginning. It required Winston Churchill.

Israel is the very embodiment of Jewish continuity: It is the only nation on earth that inhabits the same land, bears the same name, speaks the same language and worships the same God that it did 3,000 years ago.

We grow justly weary of our politics. But we must remember this: Politics - in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations - is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history.

Obama is learning very late that, for a superpower, inaction is a form of action. You can abdicate, but you really can't hide. History will find you. It has now found Obama.

Indeed, the lesson of our history is that the task of merely maintaining strong and sturdy the structures of a constitutional order is unending, the continuing and ceaseless work of every generation.

We've had exactly five balanced budgets since Alan Shepherd rode Freedom 7 in 1961. If we had put off space exploration until these earthbound social and economic conundrums were solved, our rocketry would be about where North Korea's is today.

Remember that when the people or the legislature or the media approve something with unanimity, they're probably wrong. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin resolution which essentially launched the United States into the Vietnam war. It passed the US Senate 88 to 2. It passed the House 410 to 0. That should have been a warning.

CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: DEAD WHITE MALE

As historian Barbara Tuchman once wrote, Israel is 'the only nation in the world that is governing itself in the same territory, under the same name, and with the same religion and same language as it did 3,000 years ago.

Politics — in all its grubby, grasping, corrupt, contemptible manifestations — is sovereign in human affairs. Everything ultimately rests upon it. Fairly or not, politics is the driver of history. It will determine whether we will live long enough to be heard one day. Out there. By them, the few — the only — who got it right.

Both the Left and the Right have a long history of advocating American retreat and retrenchment. The difference is that liberals want to come home because they think we are not good enough for the world. Conservatives want to wash their hands of the world because they think the world is not good enough for us.

only Churchill carries that absolutely required criterion: indispensability. Without Churchill the world today would be unrecognizable--dark, impoverished, tortured.

The way I see it, dogs had this big meeting, oh, maybe 20,000 years ago. A huge meeting--an international convention with delegates from everywhere. And that's when they decided that humans were the up-and-coming species and dogs were going to throw their lot in with them. The decision was obviously not unanimous. The wolves and dingoes walked out in protest.

Australia is the only country that has fought with the United States in every one of its major conflicts since 1914, the good and the bad, the winning and the losing.

The red-letter days, now become, to all intents and purposes, dead-letter days.

Think what you would have been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives' fables in childhood, you had been crammed with geography and natural history!

By 1870, most white men in that part of the country either belonged to the organization or sympathized with it.

Cobb was "jabbering all over the place" and practically hornpiping with glee. "What will the Babe say about this trick by Ty, five in two games?" (The feat has been equaled by several players since but has never been surpassed.)

their genial and generous host, who served the MacDonalds breakfast in bed. When MacDonald took a rare first edition of a Confederate military history down from a shelf in the cabin, Cobb noticed his interest, and insisted that he keep the book. When the three went to a restaurant,

Thus, although we are mere sojourners on the surface of the planet, chained to a mere point in space, enduring but for a moment of time, the human mind is not only enabled to number worlds beyond the unassisted ken of mortal eye, but to trace the events of indefinite ages before the creation of our race, and is not even withheld from penetrating into the dark secrets of the ocean, or the solid globe.

The present is the key to the past

I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz , that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before.

Geology is intimately related to almost all the physical sciences, as history is to the moral. An