Quotes About History

Nothing has really happened until it has been recorded.

Nothing is inevitable until it happens.

You can't have an industrial revolution, you can't have democracies, you can't have populations who can govern themselves until you have literacy. The printing press simply unlocked literacy.

We had a lot of difficulty in getting the French to accept the pyramid. They thought we were trying to import a piece of Egypt until I pointed out that their obelisk was also from Egypt and the Place des Pyramides is around the corner. Then they accepted it. The pyramid at the Louvre, though, is just the tip.

It takes a long time for a country to build a strong base in science, but only a short time to destroy it. Germany was a sad example. It was a world leader in the sciences for more than a century, until its science base was demolished during the Nazi era, and the country ceded its position to the United States.

Mount Rushmore is eternal. It will stand until the end of time.

Every ethnic group has a mythology... Until 'Roots'... there was nothing in the popular culture to refute the paragraph in elementary school history class that said, 'Slaves picked the cotton, were happy and life wasn't so bad.'

Lay this unto your breast: Old friends, like old swords, still are trusted best.

Jesus remains the most influential person in history, one who has inspired untold followers for millennia.

In 'Paltan,' I play a braveheart, Major Bishwant Singh, who was feared by the Chinese. They called him Tiger Nathu La. I feel blessed to have got an opportunity to play a real-life hero and bring to screen an untold story of our history.

The Normans came over, lance in hand, burning and trampling down every thing before them, and cutting off the Saxon dynasty and the Saxon nobles at the edge of the sword; but the right of petition remained untouched.

When you're on this major English estate, breathing in the English air, and it's untouched, you can feel its presence. It's a whole different feel. It really felt like we were there living it. It didn't feel modern, ever.

We tend to regard history as true and 'The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn' as untrue. That's always puzzled me.

The atmosphere in Sochi is unusual, in that we are surrounded by the Olympic complex. It is special to compete at a location that has played such a big part in international sporting history, which gives this place a unique feeling.

The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.

I'm very interested in the idea of unusual museums, ones that are not necessarily contemporary art museums - more like historical collections or house museums.

Islam is unusual in that it's the only one of the great world religions which was born inside recorded history. That there's an enormous amount of factual historical record about the life of a prophet and about social conditions in Arabia at that time. So it's possible to look at the origin of Islam in a scholarly way.

My father was a rags-to-riches businessman who came over in the Sixties with no money. On my mother's side, I am the grandson of a High Court judge and celebrated intelligence officer, so it's quite an unusual combination.

Your great country is wonderful at stealing pieces of history and using it for its own purposes, so there didn't seem to be anything particularly unusual about it but the English were incredibly exercised about it.

Salt is an unusual food product because it is almost universal - all human beings need salt, and most choose to eat more than is necessary.

Ironically, tendency to ignore inconvenient facts and unwelcome evidence is actually President Reagan's true legacy, as I noted in 'The Nation' back in 2000, before the current right-wing mania for President Reagan gained its full force.

Now, I can admit that as a young boy growing up in Florence, I couldn't have understood the pain that some of our neighbors felt when they looked at our flag - a pain that made many feel unwelcome and unwanted.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

As a writer of fiction who deals with technology, I necessarily deal with the history of technology and the history of technologically induced social change. I roam up and down it in a kind of special way because I roam down it into history, which is invariably itself a speculative affair.