Quotes About History

The Roman politician and philosopher Cicero once said: 'Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to be always a child. If no use is made of the labours of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge.

The view that the world has now entered a new era of the 'knowledge economy', in which making things does not confer much value, is based upon a fundamental misreading of history. We have always lived in a knowledge economy.

Free trade economists have to explain how free trade can be an explanation for the economic success of today's rich countries, when it simply had not been practised very much before they became rich.

A História é útil para destacar os limites da teoria económica.

G. HODGSON How Economics Forgot History: The Problem of Historical Specificity in Social Science

A. RONCAGLIA The Wealth of Ideas: A History of Economic Thought

But English history has demonstrated well enough how the assertion of divine inspiration from above evokes the counterassertion of divine inspiration from below, and Charles I mounted the scaffold by virtue of divine inspiration from below.

Censorship places us all in subjection, just as under despotism we are all equal … that kind of freedom of the press acts to introduce oligarchy into questions of the spirit. … That [kind of] freedom of the press pushes presumptuousness to the point of forestalling world history, substituting itself for the voice of the people. …

She has to be written out of history and written into myth.

The future is built on the ruins of the past and inhabited by its ghosts.

All gods have their houses but all houses fall eventually and when they do the gods are left with only history as their home, living in the dreams of archaeologists, in the margins of a culture's memory, in the Vellum.

Destiny can sometimes be history coming back to bite you in the arse.

Standing? says Jak. Ouais, standing, intercrural, AKA the sumata of the Samurai, the Oxford Style , the Princeton First-Year , the Ivy League Rub . Good enough for ensigns of industry, Shaka Zulu, Alexander the Great. The Altercatio Ganymedis et Helene has Zeus extoll the slippery thighs of a boy, as Billy Greene swooned over Lincoln's, as perfect as a human being could be, he said.

History shows that the devout Muslim fundamentalists are one of the most lethal threats the world has ever known.

Apparently the climax had come when he had suggested to Tamiris that in the historic sweep of dance history she was ideally equipped to dance the great Isadora Duncan. He expected flattered appreciation but Tamiris regarded him coldly, demanding, "And who will dance Tamiris?

The book of the moment often has immense vogue, while the book of the age, which comes in its company from the press, lies unnoticed; but the great book has its revenge. It lives to see its contemporary pushed up shelf by shelf until it finds its final resting-place in the garret or the auction room.

more than 150 years later, these crude breastworks are still in place). At dusk the men picked the meatiest of their stringy mules and slaughtered them for a thin gravy dinner. From that day on, this forlorn spot would be known as Mule Hill.

It was the biggest investigation ever conducted, for a single crime, in U.S. history." Several

What a sordid tradition of violence we have in our country—and what an alarming record of assassinations and assassination attempts.

them. A fire crackled in one corner, and a grand piano

the FBI's search for MLK's killer began, a manhunt that would become the largest in American history

A few days later, Dr. Ambler told De Long of a curious dream he'd had about Edison's lamps. In the dream, Sir John Franklin, the long-lost British explorer, had come aboard the Jeanette for a tour. Dr. Ambler led Franklin all over the ship and told him excitedly about Edison's electric lights, an invention that, of course, wasn't even dreamed about in Franklin's day. But Franklin bluntly interrupted him. "Your electric machine," he said, "is not worth a damn.

Alvin Josephy

Soon we will be strangers. No, we can never be that. Hurting someone is an act of reluctant intimacy. We will be dangerous acquaintances with a history.