Quotes About History

In philosophy all truth is old and only error is original.

When a man is interested in the past he writes history; when he is interested in the future he makes it.

The Roman Republic would soon be destroyed by the unfettered energy of its great men. The redeeming feature of this aristocracy and

only a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.

Nothing is lost in history: sooner or later every creative idea finds opportunity and development, and adds its color to the flame of life.

It was at that battle that Goethe, present on the staff of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, made (we are told) a famous remark: "From today and from this place begins a new epoch in the history of the world.

In the third and following centuries of our era various Celtic, Teutonic, or Asiatic tribes laid Italy waste and destroyed the classic cultures. The South creates the civilizations, the North conquers them, ruins them, borrows from them, spreads them: this is one summary of history.

No civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics

La historia ha justificado a la Iglesia en la creencia de que las masas de la humanidad desean una religión pródiga en milagros, misterio y mitos.

If Cleopatra's nose, said Pascal, had been an inch longer or shorter, all history would have been changed.

No man is educated for statesmanship who cannot see his time from the perspective of the past.

There is hardly an absurdity of the past that cannot be found flourishing somewhere in the present

History, said Bacon, is the planks of a shipwreck; more of the past is lost than has been saved.

Society is a growth in time, not a syllogism in logic; and when the past is put out through the door it comes in at the window.

the fine or composition-money for killing a king was 30,000 thrimsas ($13,000);

Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Every civilization is a fruit from the sturdy tree of barbarism, and falls at the greatest distance from its trunk.

virtue is not news, and virtuous men, like happy nations, have no history.

all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation.

As submissive natures unite with masterful individuals to make the order and operation of a society, so the imitative majority follows the innovating minority, and this follows the originative individual, in adapting new responses to the demands of environment or survival. History in the large is the conflict of minorities; the majority applauds the victor and supplies the human material of social experiment.

Babylonian mathematics rested on a division of the circle into 360 degrees

Barbarism, like the jungle, does not die out, but only retreats behind the barriers that civilization has thrown up against it, and waits there always to reclaim that to which civilization has temporarily laid claim.

They measured time by a clepsydra or water-clock, and a sun-dial, and these seem to have been not merely developed but invented by them.

The division of our month into four weeks, of our clock into twelve hours (instead of twenty-four), of our hour into sixty minutes, and of our minute into sixty seconds, are unsuspected Babylonian vestiges in our contemporary world.XVI