Quotes About History

To be sure, the cheder curriculum was narrowly limited, the pedagogical methods primitive: drill, repetition, and cracks across the knuckles with a pointer or ruler. But at a time when the overwhelming majority of humanity was illiterate, there was hardly a Jewish male over the age of five who could not read and write. The cultural impact and importance of this are for historians, sociologists, and educators to appraise.

when the overwhelming majority of Europeans were illiterate, it would have been hard to find a Jewish male over the age of five who could not read. Virtually every Jewish boy had to learn Hebrew.

In the Middle Ages, church and secular powers often forbade Jews to trim their beards in any way. Why? To be certain that a Jew could be identified.

There is no truth in the observation that after Robert Briscoe, a Jew, was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin, the Irish began to see leprecohens.

In all history there is no war which was not hatched by the governments, the governments alone, independent of the interests of the people, to whom war is always pernicious even when successful.

Kings are the slaves of history.

There will be today, there will be tomorrow, there will be always, and there was yesterday, and there was the day before...

Why does an apple fall when it is ripe? Is it brought down by the force of gravity? Is it because its stalk withers? Because it is dried by the sun, because it grows too heavy, or because the boy standing under the tree wants to eat it? None of these is the cause.... Every action of theirs, that seems to them an act of their own freewill is in the historical sense not free at all but is bound up with the whole course of history and preordained from all eternity.

Each man lives for himself, uses his freedom to achieve his personal goals, and feels with his whole being that right now he can or cannot do such-and-such an action; but as soon as he does it, this action, committed at a certain moment in time, becomes irreversible, and makes itself the property of history, in which is has not a free but a predestined significance.

Man lives consciously for himself, but serves as an unconscious instrument for the achievement of historical, universally human goals.

even if you count back only four or five generations, you have an enormous number of living biological relatives descended from those ancestors. This is why it's not very unusual if you are descended from George Washington or another founding father or mother.

We're finally becoming aware of a process that has been unconscious since human experience began. From the start, humans have perceived a Birth Vision, and then after birth have gone unconscious, aware of only the vaguest of intuitions. At first in the early day of human history, the distance between what we intended and what we actually accomplished was very great, and then, over time, the distance has closed. Now we're the verge of remembering everything.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

the Democrats vehemently opposed all civil rights, arguing that "Republican success means African domination.

We think of Rome as an empire in a way that we do not use for other nations. The others are pretenders. Rome stands alone. Throughout Europe, North Africa, and the Near East its wreckage still draws the traveler and speaks a message that is haunting: this was imperial, this was lasting, this is gone.

To forget things I like getting lost in the smell of old books, the scent of the gods.

Sonnet 55 that "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme" [1–2]).

biographical information needs to be understood within its immediate context, not through the bias of another cultural moment.

Malone's commentary on Sonnet 93 was a defining moment in the history not only of Shakespeare studies but also of literary biography in general. What has emerged in our time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

What has emerged in our own time as a dominant form of life writing can trace its lineage back to this extended footnote.

Shakespeare had no Boswell–but neither did Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or any other contemporary dramatist.

In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare's works as autobiographical.

Tell me your past, my beloved, for a man is his past, and is to be known by it.

But outside of the North of Ireland there is no religious question, and in the North it is fundamentally more political than religious.