Quotes About History

Throughout history, great philosophical minds have grappled with the nature of identity. What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

I don't want to be a presentist," the author was saying. Presentism: the anachronistic introduction of present-day ideas and perspectives into depictions or interpretations of the past.

Either all of us are accidents of history or none of us are.

Our shared vocabulary—our own language—will die with us. We are the treasure itself: fathoms deep, in the world we have made and made again.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are?

There must be that second, bobbing and darting in the aliveness of their shared history, unmistakable, glowing like a firefly in the darkness. If only they could pinpoint it and stop it there, right there, at the small but indelible spot that somehow they missed the first time around, if only, then perhaps their whole family could begin again.

Everybody is begotten and points backwards, deeper down in the depths of beginnings, the bottoms and abysses of the well of the past.

My life is a museum," says my ninety-one-year-old aunt. "I can walk through any of the galleries at any time.

They shake hands and all my past selves stretch between them like a fragile chain of paper dolls.

What makes a person a person? What combination of memory, history, imagination, experience, subjectivity, genetic substance, and that ineffable thing called the soul makes us who we are? Is who we are the same as who we believe ourselves to be?

It is a measure of true adulthood that we are able to imagine our parents as the people they may have been before us.

A psychoanalytic phrase—"unthought known"—became my instrument of illumination as I poked and prodded at my history with my parents. The psychoanalyst who coined it, Christopher

This is the trouble with origin hunting. There are so many origins.

Yet, as should become obvious, genocidal events have been common enough to suggest that they cannot be explained as some kind of deviant behavior. On the contrary, given the right circumstances, normal human beings are all too ready to kill by category.

I had more wealth, indeed, than I had before, but was not at all the richer; for I had no more use for it than the Indians of Peru had before the Spaniards came there.

The slow, deliberate forces of evolution that have shaped our emotions have done their work over the course of a million years; the last 10,000 years, despite having witnessed the rapid rise of human civilization and the explosion of the human population from five million to five billion, have left little imprint on our biological templates for emotional life.

When the necessary eleven days were added, George Washington's birthday, which fell on February 11, 1731, Old Style, became February 22, 1732, New Style.

In 1792 their decimal calendar replaced the 7-day week by a 10-day week called a décade, each day of which was given a Latin numerical name, three of which comprised a month. The day was divided into ten hours, each consisting of 100 minutes, each minute of 100 seconds.

The first literary work in prose was history. And we call Herodotus (c.480–c.425 B.C.) the Father of History because his is the earliest surviving work in Greek prose that aimed to give literary form to an extended narrative of the past. The Greek historie means "inquiry" or the search for truth. Herodotus might also perhaps be called the Father of Prose, for until his time verse was still the normal vehicle for narratives of great events and heroes of the past.

The best survey of the spirit and practice of the laws of Massachusetts Bay is found in Zechariah Chafee Jr.'s brilliant introduction to the Records of the Suffolk County Court, 1671–1680, in the Colonial Society of Massachusetts Publications, Vol. XXIX.

When in our schools the study of current events (that is, of what is reported in the newspapers) displaces the facts of history, it is inevitable that the standard of knowledge propagated by newspapers and magazines and television networks themselves (that is, whether one is up on what is reported in the newspapers, magazines, and television) overshadows all others. When to be informed is to knowledgeable about pseudo-events, the line between knowledge and ignorance is blurred as never before.

Herodotus also repeatedly reports the prophetic power of dreams, though he leaves the reader to judge.

No one alive today has a single ancestor in his or her past who died in infancy. We are the champions, my friend!

It's amazing," Carrington continued, "how close Washington came to losing to the British. I mean, the man lost more battles than he won. Defeat after defeat, for years. What turned things around was that he embraced espionage.