Quotes About History

The floor was covered with a faded, barely legible carpet, its traditional pattern of tanks and helicopters worn to colorless patterns of weft.

Change is happening and old structures are falling in the form of a Death of a Thousand Cuts. In other words one grand act is not occuring but a multitude of small expressions on the part of individuals, both slowly and swiftly taking the place of heirarchy and history.

I must say that anyone who passed through those years [of World War II] without understanding that man produces evil as a bee produces honey, must have been blind or wrong in the head.

The whole book is posing a question. You think you've won a war - what you've done is finish a war. There was a crime committed in that war the like of which perhaps was never committed in human history. You think about it.

History is the nothing people write about a nothing.

I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me (Spiegel & Grau, 2015)

Roger's arm was conditioned by a civilization that knew nothing of him and was in ruins.

This was long after hairdressers; in truth, ever since there have been women, there have been hairdressers, Adam being the first, though the King James scholars do their very best to muddy this point.)

In any case, the two countries had stayed alive over the centuries mainly by warring on each other. There had been the Olive War, the Tuna Fish Discrepancy, which almost bankrupted both nations, the Roman Rift, which did send them both into insolvency, only to be followed by the Discord of the Emeralds, in which they both got rich again, chiefly by banding together for a brief period and robbing everybody within sailing distance.

The main thing was to know the world, every twenty-five years or so, back for a couple hundred years, and if you had that info handy, always there under your belt, then you could figure out the gaps.

It's not important, believe me; the past has a way of being past.

For the pedant, dates are deities, worthy of worship, but for the true social historian, they are minutiae only, a shorthand, convenient reminders and no more. You do not ask a Titanic survivor, 'Let me see now, just exactly when was that?' You ask him this: 'What was it like? How did you feel?' And that is the job of the social historian: to make the past vibrant for the present; to emotionally involve those of us who were not there. And to make us understand.

Da che esistono le donne, esistono i parrucchieri, e Adamo fu il primo, benché gli studiosi di Re Giacomo abbiano tentato di confondere le acque.

My father was an historian

Not that it matters, but most of what follows is true.

All history is only one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow-men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others and might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others.

History is only a tiresome repetition of one story.

The pensions in England used to be given to aristocrats who had political power, in order to corrupt them. Here

But, to judge the action fairly, we must transport ourselves to the age when it happened.

It was a short step from the liberal Christ-the-highest-in-humanity to the Nazi Superman.

The history of all love is writ with one pen.

And, so to tell more about the South Watcher. A million years gone, as I have told, came it out from the blackness of the South, and grew steadily nearer through twenty thousand years; but so slow that in no one year could a man perceive that it had moved.

Scenes An old house in a run-down neighborhood of a Midwestern city.