Quotes About History

The author says that though the Mexican War wound down, the interpretation of it was just beginning.

The press-savy Lincoln looked not to the future, but to the past.

Every theory of social action is ultimately a philosophy of history. It attempts, as best it may, to read in the experience of mankind the lessons which would justify its own special urgency.

I was determined that no British government should be brought down by the action of two tarts.

Harold MacMillan

Deberíamos usar el pasado como trampolín y no como sofá.

The earth's about five million years old, at least. Who can afford to live in the past?

I was brought up in the War. I was an adolescent in the Second World War. And I did witness in London a great deal of the Blitz.

American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe.

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews.

We have made the 20th century the century of the individual. For most of human history, a person was part of a family, part of a clan or tribe or neighborhood. People defined themselves on the basis of their relationships to other people, not on the basis of their individual achievements.

In America, the advent of the modern serial killer coincided absolutely with the coming of the automobile.

May 5, the Chicago American, within the space of a few paragraphs, branded her as both "the most fiendish murderer of the age" and "the most fiendish murderess in history.

the worst rioting in the city's history when a mob of ten thousand citizens, outraged over the lenient sentence given to one of the killers, ransacked the courthouse and set it on fire in March 1884.

Allegheny County, Pennsylvania

Virtually nothing is known about the early life of Andrew Philip Kehoe, the man his neighbors would later dub "the world's worst demon."1 Philip Kehoe had already sired six daughters before Andrew came into the world on February 1, 1872. As the first son, Andrew occupied a special place in the family: the "long sought" male heir who was both "enthroned" by his parents and burdened with the highest expectations of a proud, stern, and demanding father.2

In the years immediately following the end of the Great War, approximately fifty thousand one-room schools were replaced with these "fine upstanding structures—schools that in every way compare[d] with big-city institutions." By 1922, there were roughly "12,000 of this new type of school in the United States." Indiana alone had more than one thousand; Ohio, Iowa, and Minnesota more than nine hundred, four hundred, and three hundred, respectively.6

In short, while brain damage is often present in the case histories of serial killers, other kinds of damage play a central role, too—especially the emotional and psychological damage inflicted by a shockingly abusive upbringing.

In the English language, the word "sadism" only goes back a hundred years or so. (It wasn't until 1897 that it first appeared in print, according to the Oxford English Dictionary.) In that sense, "sadism" is like "serial killer": a modern expression for an age-old phenomenon.

The main essentials of a successful prime minister are sleep and a sense of history.

Notwithstanding my grandmother's long and faithful service to her owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or the horses they tend.

Abraham Lincoln. When he met Stowe, it is claimed that he said, "So you're the little woman that started this great war!

Perhaps the mildest form of the system of slavery is to be seen in the State of Kentucky.

To know yourself is to know where you're from