Quotes About History

Some Passages from a Journal That Was Never Kept

Those who tell the stories rule society.

What was past was past. I suppose that was the general attitude.

The only people who make no mistakes are dead people. I saw a man last week who has not made a mistake for four hundred years. He was a mummy in the Egyptian department of the British Museum." - H.L. Wayland

The procession was led by Vice President Thomas Marshall, whose lasting contribution to American history is his opinion that "What this country needs is a good five-cent cigar.

narrative is the principal way in which our species organizes its understanding of time.

Violence is as American as cherry pie.

It is imperative that the past of the pilgrims' progress be intentionally carried forward into the present as we work into our future. Without it we cannot know who we are, why we are here, or where we can go. Without a common past to live out of we become aimless and wandering individuals instead of a pilgrim people.

Nothing is as evanescent in history as the pansophic theories that flourish among the illuminati of all times under the bright sunlight of the latest scientific discoveries; and nothing can be more easily dismissed by later periods as mere speculation.

The Egyptian word Pir-em-us meant to them something of great vertical height. From this the Greek form Pyramis, or the plural Pyramides was formed.

The Pilgrims made seven times more graves than huts. No Americans have been more impoverished than these who, nevertheless, set aside a day of thanksgiving.

Whiggery came of age in 1896, and he spoke

the admitted first-cause 'of all-time, of all-history

Helen, Helen, come home; there was a Helen before there was a War, but who remembers her?

Pompeii has nothing to teach us, we know crack of volcanic fissure, slow flow of terrible lava, pressure on heart, lungs, the brain about to burst its brittle case (what the skull can endure!)

I mean seeing the Elgin marbles this morning gave me the same feeling and I didn't know, don't know whether I'm in Rome or Paris. I mean the Louvre and the British Museum hold one together, keep one from going to bits.

Women are marvellous at plodding through the centuries. They are exact, accurate and tireless. If you ever wish to discover some minute fact, buried away at the bottom of a bin of forgotten parchments, find a girl with horn-rimmed spectacles and straight hair and ask her to do it for you.

Those who today explore the curious ramifications of the Sultan's Palace at Istanbul may fancy, not without reason, that they see the only reflection left on earth of the once crowded Roman Palatine.

Among the collection of crimes of American "civilization," lynching has a special place of honor.

I want to go down in history.

Outside the kingdom of the Lord there is no nation which is greater than any other. God and history will remember your judgment.

Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted; the indifference of those who should have known better; the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most; that has made it possible for evil to triumph.

The draft is white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from the red people.

In fact, most successful people are those who have been well supported, financially and emotionally, by their parents when they were children. Likewise, as I discussed in chapter 2, the rich countries liberalized their trade only when their producers were ready, and usually only gradually even then. In other words, historically, trade liberalization has been the outcome rather than the cause of economic development.