Quotes About History

War is one of the constants of history, and has not diminished with civilization or democracy. In the last 3,421 years of recorded history only 268 have seen no war.

Probably every vice was once a virtue … Man's sins may be the relics of his rise rather than the stigmata of his fall.

Generaciones de hombres establecen un dominio creciente sobre la tierra, pero están destinados a convertirse en fósiles en su suelo.

To the Romans, the Greeks and the Jews Sumeria was unknown.

We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive recirculation. IX

Cyrus and Darius created Persia, Xerxes inherited it, his successors destroyed it.

the historian records the exceptional because it is interesting—because it is exceptional.

The state is the soul of man enlarged under the microscope of history.

Before Aristotle, science was in embryo; with him it was born.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

The record is broken and incomplete, not because India ever rested, but because war and the idol-smashing ecstasies of Moslems destroyed uncounted masterpieces of building and statuary, and poverty neglected the preservation of others.

Sumeria was to Babylonia, and Babylonia to Assyria, what Crete was to Greece, and Greece to Rome:

When Cyrus and his disciplined Persians stood at the gates, the anticlericals of Babylon connived to open the city to him, and welcomed his enlightened domination.170 For two centuries Persia ruled Babylonia as part of the greatest empire that history had yet known. Then the exuberant Alexander came, captured the unresisting capital, conquered all the Near East, and drank himself to death in the palace of Nebuchadrezzar.171

Perhaps, within these limits, we can learn enough from history to bear reality patiently, and to respect one another's delusions.

the royal revenue was doubled from 600 to 1200 livres ($240,000) a day. In his reign the façade of Notre Dame was completed, and the Louvre was built as a fortress to guard the Seine.62 When Philip died (1223) the France of today had been born.

On August 26 the Assembly responded by conferring French citizenship upon Joseph Priestley, Jeremy Bentham, William Wilberforce, Anacharsis Cloots, Johann Pestalozzi, Thaddeus Kosciusko, Friedrich Schiller, George Washington, Thomas Paine, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

There is, again, a "Multiplication of Effects": one cause may produce a vast variety of results, and help to differentiate the world; a word amiss, like Marie Antoinette's, or an altered telegram at Ems, or a wind at Salamis, may play an endless rôle in history.

Come, brave Diderot, intrepid d'Alembert, ally yourselves; . . . overwhelm the fanatics and the knaves, destroy the insipid declamations, the miserable sophistries, the lying history, . . . the absurdities without number; do not let those who have sense be subjected to those who have none; and the generation which is being born will owe to us its reason and its liberty.

Perhaps Tarde and James are right, and all history is a succession of inventions made by genius and turned into conventions by the people, a series of initiatives taken by adventurous leaders and spread among the masses of mankind by the waves of imitation.

The oldest written records known to us are Sumerian;

But how far has human nature changed in the course of history? Theoretically there must have been some change; natural selection has presumably operated upon psychological as well as upon physiological variations. Nevertheless, known history shows little alteration in the conduct of mankind.

No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for these are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.

In the last 3,421 years of recorded history, only 268 have seen no war

pugnacity, greed, brutality, and sexual readiness were advantages in the struggle for existence. Probably every vice was once a virtue