Quotes About History

History is the myth, the true myth, of man's fall made manifest in time.

At times I was aware, while they were happening, that I was a witness to extraordinary events, and I tried to remember them as fully and as accurately as possible, with the conscious intent of recording them, should I be fortunate enough to survive the war. Such

I like listening to old music and collecting the odd artifact from those times but I can't just stay in one time period for too long. For me, that's leaning too far back into a couch and recounting war stories to your vet friends because they know what you know. That's basically saying that it's all over and now you're just going to recline ever further into the decaying echo of the past. No way, Fanatic. That's surrender and I can't do it.

History is a jangle of accidents, blunders, surprises and absurdities, and so is our knowledge of it, but if we are to report it at all we must impose some order upon it.

Harald said, 'In England, in the south, there is a circle of great stones, about which men say the same thing. It was there before the Romans came, and it will be there when Odin decides to crumble the world in his two great hands. There are some such monuments which are meant to teach man that he is but a little thing, with a life hardly longer than that of a spring fly.

I feel a kind of reverence for the first books of young authors. There is so much aspiration in them, so much audacious hope and trembling fear, so much of the heart's history, that all errors and shortcomings are for a while lost sight of in the amiable self assertion of youth.

A Lady with a Lamp [Florence Nightingale] shall standIn the great history of the land,A noble type of good,Heroic womanhood.

The student has his Rome, his Florence, his whole glowing Italy, within the four walls of his library. He has in his books the ruins of an antique world and the glories of a modern one.

One if by land, and two if by sea;And I on the opposite shore will be,Ready to ride and spread the alarmThrough every Middlesex village and farm.

The fate of a nation was riding that night.

Listen, my children, and you shall hear,Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;Hardly a man is now aliveWho remembers that famous day and year.

If anyone, then, asks me the meaning of our flag, I say to him - it means just what Concord and Lexington meant; what Bunker Hill meant; which was, in short, the rising up of a valiant young people against an old tyranny to establish the most momentous doctrine that the world had ever known - the right of men to their own selves and to their liberties.

A thoughtful mind, when it sees a nation's flag, sees not the flag only, but the nation itself; and whatever may be its symbols, its insignia, he reads chiefly in the flag the government, the principles, the truths, the history which belongs to the nation that sets it forth.

The world's battlefields have been in the heart chiefly more heroism has been displayed in the household and the closet, than on the most memorable battlefields in history.

Forgotten also is Jefferson's blunt rationalization for enslaving African-Americans. Augustus John Foster, who visited Jefferson at Monticello in 1807, reported that "he considered them to be as far inferior to the rest of mankind as the mule is to the horse, and as made to carry burthens.

In the West Indies and South America, slaves were worked to death and replaced with fresh imports, but in the continental North American colonies of Great Britain the situation was the opposite. By about 1710, as Morgan notes, "Virginia's slave population began to grow from natural increase, an unprecedented event for any New World slave population.…In 1700 Virginia had 13,000 slaves; in 1730, 40,000; in 1750, 105,000, of whom nearly 80 percent were Virginia born.

The terrible suffering among the freed slaves during Reconstruction has been overshadowed, in popular literature and film, by the fall of the white planters, exemplified by the figure of Scarlett O'Hara.

We know how much corn they [i.e., the enslaved people on Hairston plantations] ate, but do not know how they felt to see the sun rise.

A peculiar gravity kept the white and black Hairstons at Cooleemee. Judge Hairston's grandfather had abandoned the house after the Civil War, but misfortune brought his family back to it. They had no other place to go. When the white Hairstons returned, so did the blacks. Thrown back together by necessity, the Hairstons acted out, in microcosm, the long aftermath of slavery.

His family, it seemed evident, had enslaved their own flesh and blood for generations. It had happened so far back in the past that the whites had been able to forget it, and even among the blacks it was only a dim memory—so dim that it had only the frail substance of a phantom, a voice that whispered only faintly in the roll of begats carried in the memories of the elders.

The evening before he had been at one of Nero's feasts

This history of culture will explain to us the motives, the conditions of life, and the thought of the writer or reformer.

The subject of history is the life of peoples and mankind.

Millions of men, renouncing their human feelings and reason, had to go from west to east to slay their fellows, just as some centuries previously hordes of men had come from the east to the west slaying their fellows.