Quotes About History

once spoke about the genetics of ancestry with a Holocaust historian who had hunted some of the last surviving Nazis in the 1990s. When I told him that little letters in our genetic code might testify to the ethnicity of our parents and grandparents, he said, "The Nazis would have loved this." They would certainly have seized upon the idea, but in the end the full picture would have let them down just as badly as all the other dubious measures of race they tried to develop.

There is evidence from ancient DNA that lighter skin, hair, and eye pigmentation was strongly selected for in Europe in just the last five thousand years.

Future historians could retrieve the mountain's records and re-create many hundreds of years of demographic history. Would they also discover that most humans from all of history were, in fact, Mormons?

At the time that the sagas were written, however, names were not passed down in families, and recall that English surnames only came into being seven hundred years ago.

According to Ralph, based on the DNA you have in common, these distant cousins may be fifth cousins, but they might also be fifteenth cousins, and you may share a common ancestor much further back than you think.

The history of any scientific concept—energy, atom, gene, cancer, memory—is one of increased differentiation and sophistication until it can be explained in a quantitative and mechanistic manner at a lower, more elemental level.

Iemand anders sal dié storie ook moet vertel om geloofwaardigheid daaraan te gee; die storie kan nie net teer op herinnering wat dit plooi na die eise van die hede nie.

Was this the face that launched a thousand ships/And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?

6 Yet, history took a different course. Mozart died that December and the adjunct post fell to Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, court organist in Vienna, distinguished composer, theorist, and Mozart's senior by twenty years.7 A little over a year later, the Viennese magistrate also honored the commitment previously made to Mozart and, after Hofmann's death in March 1793, Albrechtsberger became kapellmeister of the cathedral and retained that office until the end of his life in 1809.

Recuerdo haber visto, en imágenes de archivo, a cerdos paseándose por la Biblioteca Nacional de Phnom Penh, vaciada por los jemeres rojos. Derribaban sillas y pisoteaban mondaduras. Los cerdos sustituían a los libros. Y nosotros sustituíamos a los cerdos.

There will never be another Camelot," she told White wistfully. "There will be great presidents again—and the Johnsons are wonderful, they've been wonderful to me—but there'll never be another Camelot again.

IT HAD BEEN ONLY a little more than a year since the world pulled out to celebrate the nuptials of the future king and his strikingly beautiful wife—eventually to become England's first working-class, university-educated queen. Now, in 2012, Great Britain

In stark contrast to William's mother, Kate had never come close to moving in aristocratic circles, much less royal ones. She was an untitled commoner, a descendant of coal miners and factory workers. Kate's mother, Carole, grew up partly in public housing and was working as a British Airways flight attendant when she met and married fellow airline employee Michael Middleton.

History is made not simply with events, but by remembering those events, a double drumbeat like a heartbeat. History can be written not only with books but with ceremonies. Yet a real event read about in a newspaper is not always more important than a fictional one in a novel or play or poem.

The gay revolution began as a literary revolution.

Yet while Vidal writes best about power, politics, and history White's strengths are sex, art and – sometimes – love. Each tends to stumble when he enters the other's domain.

How many times had those awful words - "I know what I'm doing" - been uttered throughout history as prelude to disaster?

You could drink hard liquor in the middle of a school day without people assuming you were an alcoholic underachiever. Strange how in America in the 1950s, at the height of its industrial and imperial power, men drank double-martinis for lunch. Now, in its decline, they drank fizzy water. Somewhere something had gone terribly wrong.

Once they're both gone, your parents' house instantly turns into a museum.

Why should you give up God because of gunpowder? Since the world began, God in his wisdom has given us tools with which to slaughter each other. Jawbones of asses. Slings. Swords. Crossbows. Why shouldn't he give us gunpowder?

Today's temperatures are about the same as in the 1930s and cooler than a thousand years ago.

Three weeks before Kennedy was killed in Dallas, Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem was ousted and then murdered in a coup that Kennedy had authorized.

One of history's secrets is that the revolutionaries' appeal in the eyes of posterity owes much to the traits they share with the world they overthrew.

Mddle Eastern history is filled with minefields, not because of what actually happened in the past, but because of how people read back the present into the past.