Quotes About History

If only Myrtle would pay attention to the Boy's Own Journal, Blackwood's Magazine, etc., she would know that these creatures were Threls, who come from a worldlet called Threlfall on the far side of the asteroid belt. This Threlfall is a cheerless, chilly spot, and the whole history and religion of the Threls has been concerened with their quest to knit a nice woolly coverlet for it.

The idea of universal history presupposes the Christian idea of the unity of God, and the unity and common destiny of men, and was unknown to ancient Greece and Rome.

The remark of Goethe is as profound as it is true: "The conflict of faith and unbelief remains the proper, the only, the deepest theme of the history of the world and mankind, to which all others are subordinated.

It is not the business of the historian to construct a history from preconceived notions and to adjust it to his own liking, but to reproduce it from the best evidence and to let it speak for itself.

More Christian blood has been shed by Christians than by heathens and Mohammedans.

But, in spite of all confusion and difficulty in regard to details, it is generally agreed to divide the history of Christianity into three principal parts—ancient, mediaeval, and modern; though there is not a like agreement as to the dividing epochs, or points of departure and points of termination. I. The history of Ancient Christianity, from the birth of Christ to Gregory the Great. A.D. 1–590.

The history of mankind before his birth must be viewed as a preparation for his coming, and the history after his birth as a gradual diffusion of his spirit and progress of his kingdom.

The noun 'spirituality' in the Middle Ages simply meant the clergy. Subsequently it first appeared in reference to 'the spiritual life' during the 17th century. It disappeared for a time but re-established itself at the end of the 19th century in French, of which the modern English word 'spirituality' is a translation.

Revolutions, even as they destroy, build on the model of what has gone before.

I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet.

So, then, the best of the historian is subject to the poet; for whatsoever action or faction, whatsoever counsel, policy, or war-stratagem the historian is bound to recite, that may the poet, if he list, with his imitation make his own, beautifying it both for further teaching and more delighting, as it pleaseth him; having all, from Dante's Heaven to his Hell, under the authority of his pen.

Old Prague was a story-book city caked in grime: ancient, soot-blackened. History lived in every detail: in the deerstalker rooftops and the blue-sparking trams. He wandered the streets in disbelief, photographing everything, images from Kafka crowding into his head. With the turn of every corner it came back to him: the special frisson you get behind enemy lines.

The history of social, political and technological change is inextricably bound to the history of thought.

The modern information age would never have been possible without the work of the great logician Frege. Female suffrage was taken seriously only after Wollstonecraft. The Enlightenment stood in need of a Voltaire, Einstein needed Newton and Newton, in turn, relied on Aristotle. The history of social, political and technological change is inextricably bound to the history of thought.

The history of social, political and technological change is inextricably bound to the history of thought. To

The memories of men are too frail a thread to hang history from.

was one of the worst—arguably the worst—intelligence failure in modern history.

history hit a curve, and as Karl Marx once quipped, when that happens, the intellectuals fall off.

The greatest importance of the Dead Sea Scrolls...lies in the discovery of biblical manuscripts dating back to only about 300 years after the close of the Old Testament canon.

Reading contemporary accounts brings home the fact that of any battle or campaign there are at least for different versions. One is that of those who fought in it, two is of the generals who commanded it, three is of those who reported on it at the time and made what they could of a mass of confused and often misleading information, and four is the version of those who had a theory about it and reported those facts which happened to fit the version they were trying to portray.

Our history is every human history; a black and gory business, with more scoundrels than wise men at the lead, and more louts than both put together to cheer and follow.

We must picture Oxford, during World War I, not as the neomedieval paradise it would like to be, but as the military compound it was obliged to become.

Words are catch-basins of experience, fingerprints and footprints of the past that the literary detective may scrutinize in order to sleuth out the history of human consciousness.

Words contain the "souls" or minds of people in the past; as such, they tell the story of consciousness.