Quotes About History

The illusion that we understand the past fosters overconfidence in our ability to predict the future.

After all, neither the French Revolution nor any of the other revolutions that occurred in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century had ushered in eras of glorious reform, let alone utopias. On the contrary, they had resulted in periods of terror and/or sustained counterrevolutionary repression.

I didn't know what to tell her.I wished I could say that like the House of Atreus or Cadmus we were suffering for the sinesof our forefathers, or fulfilling an ancient Greek oracle.But I had no answer for her, or for myself.

I don't know why I resented it so intensely to have them think of me as something newly minted in their private treasury, but it was-I am certain-echoes of that idea that had been sounding in the chambers of my mind from the time we had arrived in Chicago. I wanted to get up and show everyone what a fool he was, to shout at him: I'm a human being, a person - with parents and memories and a history - and I was before you ever wheeled me into that operating room!

to gawk, for the entire apartment had been turned into a private archive, a museum of an extinct culture, in which Feuer himself had assembled whatever fragments of Striy's lost Jewish life he could get his hands on: old prayer books, maps, yellowing documents, municipal surveys, photographs of people he knew

Y]our agricultural revolution is not an event like the Trojan War, isolated in the distant past and without relevance to your lives today. The work begun by those neolithic farmers in the Near East has been carried forward from one generation to the next without a single break, right into the present moment. It's the foundation of your vast civilization today in exactly the same way that it was the foundation of the very first farming village.

Yes,I'm afraid you're right. Trial and error isn't a bad way to learn how to build an aircraft,but it can be a disastrous way to learn how to build a civilization.

What he had to tell them was a story

Has it ever occurred to you to wonder if the history we teach our children is a lie?

But we're not humanity, we're just one culture - one culture out of hundreds of thousands that have lived their vision on this planet and sung their song. If it were humanity that needed changing, then we'd be out of luck. But it isn't humanity that needs changing, it's just...us.

Putting food under lock and key was one of the great innovations of your culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key - and putting it there is the cornerstone of your economy.[...] Because if the food wasn't under lock and key, Julie, who would work?

No invention ever comes into being fully developed in a single step, from nothing. Ten thousand inventions had to be in place before Edison could invent the electric light-bulb.

Making food a commodity to be owned was one of the great innovations of our culture. No other culture in history has ever put food under lock and key—and putting it there is the cornerstone of our economy, for if the food wasn't under lock and key, who would work?

the story of our agricultural revolution as told by some of the earliest victims of that revolution.

And so your account of creation ends, 'And finally man appeared.'

In Specter, history becomes what never happened. People mess things up, forget and remember all the wrong things. What's left is fiction.

Turkey's regional role, which Erdo?an describes as "a continuation of the Ottomans"? Turkey's "accretion of history, and geographic location," he says, make it "the only country that can lead the Muslim world.

Russia became the largest exporter of wheat in the world—quite a turnaround from the 1970s, when the Soviet Union spent a good part of its oil earnings buying wheat from the United States. Moreover, in retaliation for the sanctions, the Russian

finally the offering was launched on December 11, 2019, on the home court—the much smaller Riyadh stock exchange. Just 1.5 percent of the company was on offer. Still, it finally topped out at $29.4 billion, eclipsing the debut value of China's Alibaba to become the largest IPO in history.

Xi Jinping is of a new generation—the first Chinese leader born after World War II. His father, a veteran of the revolution, had risen to vice premier, before being purged and imprisoned.

By the end of 2018, Russian output reached 11.4 million barrels per day, as high as at the peak for Russia in Soviet days.

Energy transitions are not new. They have been going on for a long time and unfold over time. Previous energy transitions have primarily been driven by technology, economics, environmental considerations, and convenience and ease. The current one has politics, policy, and activism more mixed in.

A singular cartographic combatant led the charge—Bai Meichu, one of China's most influential and respected geographers.

Does all this mean that China and the United States are headed for what Harvard professor Graham Allison called the "Thucydides Trap"? Named for the ancient Athenian military historian, the concept depicts the risk of war arising from the collision between a "dominant" power and a "rising" power.