Quotes About History

But the revolutions and changes which are responsible for the present state of the earth are not limited to the upsetting of the ancient strata and to the ebbing of the sea after the formations of new layers.

The CIA's official history of the Bay of Pigs operation is filled with dramatic and harrowing details that not only lay bare the strategic, logistical, and political problems that doomed the invasion, but also how the still-green President John F. Kennedy scrambled to keep the U.S. from entering into a full conflict with Cuba.

While history has its limitations in shaping contemporaneous and forward-looking strategic choices, it does shape popular perceptions.

The suffragettes were quite strategic about documenting their events, and there were some good photos. And we developed a roll of film that had never been developed before!

Poland is an attractive country, and first and foremost it's got a very important strategic location in Europe.

The color, the shape, and the texture—none of it is accidental. Every item we wear has a glorious (or sometimes not so glorious) history, and that history extends back years—centuries, even—before Oscar de la Renta's 2002 collection.

The Holocaust also shows us how a combination of events and attitudes can erode a society's democratic values.

Since its founding in 1854, Penn State has proven to be a leading institution of higher learning.

the landscape tells - or rather is - a story. It enfolds the lives and times of predecessors who, over the generations, have moved around in it and played their part in its formation. To perceive the landscape is therefore to carry out an act of remembrance, and remembering is not so much a matter of calling up an internal image, stored in the mind, as of engaging perpetually with the environment that is itself pregnant with the past

The present is not marked off from a past that it has replaced or a future that will, in turn, replace it; it rather gathers the past and future into itself, like refractions in a crystal ball. — Tim Ingold from "The Temporality of the Landscape," World Archaeology (vol. 25, no. 2)

the modern Ukrainian state is that it has never been able to create an all-encompassing post-Soviet narrative of modern Ukrainian history that was broadly accepted by most, if not all.

For as long as anyone can remember, the history of Kosovo has been a battlefield pitting Serbs against Albanians. Each believes different things because each has been taught different things, and as they reach further back into time it becomes easier to argue whatever they want in order to find support for their view of the present.

short-lived German-supported Ukrainian state, which the Donetsk–Krivoy Rog Republic had resisted. Now, she said, it was a ridiculous irony that Ukrainians were destroying statues of Lenin when they should be grateful to him.

The point is that it was something done by others against us. In Ukraine, as indeed in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge genocide of 1975–79, it was not something quite so clearly done by others.

In the period from 1939 to 1941, the Soviet Union was allied to Nazi Germany and supplied it with the raw materials it used to make war on the Western allies. After Hitler attacked the Soviet Union everything changed of course, but officially the Soviet account could only say that the war had begun in 1941.

It was strange. I was already looking at something as it had been. History looked so calm.

Under the same star... A history from love. i love the romances

My final slide quoted the words of biologist Louis Agassiz: 'Every scientific truth goes through three states: first, people say it conflicts with the Bible; next, they say it has been discovered before; lastly, they say they always believed it.

Stories are for joining the past to the future. Stories are for those late hours in the night when you can't remember how you got from where you were to where you are. Stories are for eternity, when memory is erased, when there is nothing to remember except the story.

Together we understood what terror was: you're not human anymore. You're a shadow. You slip out of your own skin, like molting, shedding your own history and your own future, leaving behind everything you ever were or wanted to believed in. You know you're about to die. And it's not a movie and you aren't a hero and all you can do is whimper and wait.

But the thing about remembering is that you don't forget.

But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

Much is said about escapism in narrative and fiction. But perhaps the greatest escapism of all is to take refuge in the domesticity of the past, the home that history and literature become, avoiding the one moment of time in which we are not at home, yet have to live: the present.

More than one person has claimed that the whole history of Italy as a nation-state could be reconstructed through an account of the country's railways.