Quotes About History

Politicians have been downplaying the importance of history as a subject in our schools but, if they had bothered to have a better grasp of history themselves, they might have avoided costly wars. Instead they act like children. The only time that they think matters is their own.

It's really empowering when you see yourself represented in entertainment and, especially, onstage when you're talking about how this country came to be.

If we do have people appearing on the air live that are later found out to be Holocaust deniers or anything like that, we immediately put them onto a list of people who are forbidden from the air.

It's really fun to think about what it would be like to see Walter Davidson step onto a modern-day motorcycle. He'd probably go insane! But motorcycles were such a part of him.

My instinct is to write under the cloak of an opaque historical setting.

Israel is too attached to America, too influenced by America. It should be connected to Europe. America is based on mythology - the free man, the individual, the open frontier. Europe is more conscious of history. Take Britain and Shakespeare. You shape your identity through history.

As scientists, we keep an open mind, but we have to base our ideas about the past on archaeological evidence.

I think that the memory of Armenia's genocide opened my eyes at an early age to the existence of political cynicism.

My first jam was at Hotel Diplomat opening for Hollywood.

I'm proud of who I am. I'm proud of my history. I'm proud of the women and the men who came before us who are black, and I'm proud of the women before me who are black and who have achieved so much, even though we have so much against us, and we don't have those doors opening for us every day.

On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.

I went to Zanzibar on holiday and there was a lot there about civil rights and there was a museum, where there are old slave chambers. It was horrible to go to and they've still got the chains there. It opens your eyes a lot.

We consider Monteverdi the first composer of opera. There was someone before, but everything started with Monteverdi.

Well, opera began with an intent to resuscitate Greek drama, that is, modern opera as we know it.

There was always dance in opera until people forgot to keep it going.

We tend to forget that in those days before the Internet and HBO and Imax and 3-D cinema, opera was the thing. Opera and theatre. If you were a man of the world and you mingled among the happy few, you would be at the opera.

I think my great-grandpa was an opera singer or something.

Granted, everybody is different, but I think it's real important to know all the people that you are around, and how they operate their history, and things like that. You know where they are coming from a little bit, and you don't insult them, or take something for granted.

Rupert Murdoch is probably the most successful media proprietor and operator in history.

I grew up in kind of the last generation of Canadians who thought things that were happening in Britain were more important, almost, than what was happening in Canada. And my mother was fervently of that opinion.

Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

Biography lends to death a new terror.

Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is a man's original virtue.

Before Turner there was no fog in London.