Quotes About History

(Wine is) the nurse of old age.

Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

My forte is playing drunks down the ages. When my agent rings me about a role, I don't ask what the part is, but what century it's in.

The Elizabethan age might be better named the beginning of the smoking era.

Ice ages have come and gone. Coral reefs have persisted.

We should burn all libraries and allow to remain only that which everyone knows by heart. A beautiful age of the legend would then begin.

[On being asked in her later years if she were Tallulah:] I'm what's left of her, dahling.

Up to the age of 14 I had not heard a note of anything before 1750, never heard a note of Bach, never heard anything after Wagner, and never heard any real jazz.

We extol ancient things, regardless of our own times. [Lat., Vetera extollimus recentium incuriosi.]

Strange how blind people are! They are horrified by the torture chambers of the Middle Ages, but their arsenals fill them with pride!

Time will run back and fetch the Age of Gold.

Books, like proverbs, receive their chief value from the stamp and esteem of the ages through which they have passed.

A Dark Age is not just a period in which people no longer know how to do things. The real key is that people no longer remember that certain things can be done at all.

Forty is ... an age at which people have histories and options. At thirty, they had perhaps less history. At fifty, perhaps fewer options.

Then Elrond and Galadriel rode on; for the Third Age was over and the Days of the Rings were passed and an end was come of the story and song of those times.

There is something dark and wintry about the atmosphere of the later Middle Ages.

Every generation enjoys the use of a vast hoard bequeathed to it by antiquity, and transmits that hoard, augmented by fresh acquisitions, to future ages.

The gods of one age become the devils of the age to follow. The priests look forward to the age to come and see only the end of the world.

I developed a passion for the Middle Ages the same way some people develop a passion for coconuts.

Hey, even the Mona Lisa is falling apart.

In all ages, far back into prehistory, we find human beings have painted and adorned themselves.

Errors flies from mouth to mouth, from pen to pen, and to destroy it takes ages.

The ideal historian goes to the mouth of the tomb, cries: "Lazarus, come forth!" and sets him that was dead for ages, blinking and passionate, in the sun.

I was there when the quote-unquote golden age of musical theater was flourishing. I met everybody who worked in theater or was famous in theater from the '40s on.