Quotes About History

In 1982, Raphael Nachman, visiting lecturer in mathematics at the university in Cracow, declined the tour of Auschwitz, where his grandparents had died, and asked instead to visit the ghetto where they had lived.

The Nazis take the skeleton in the closet of centuries and rattle it boastfully. Force, they declare, will always be necessary, since it is in the nature of human life (which is true, if one accepts their concept of human life).

Scholar George Myerson has recently written a study of happiness. After 250 pages tracking moments of joy throughout history, he concludes that humans are happiest hanging with friends, gathered around tables with good food and conversation and laughter. If you can get that table out of doors, so the sun can kiss the skin—if as you dine together you can also provide help for others—then, according to Myerson, you've won the lottery of life.[36]

Suddenly I heard Virginia's voice calling to me from the sitting room window: "Hitler is making a speech." I shouted back, "I shan't come. I'm planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.

I realise that I do not change the course of history. I am an actor, I do a movie, that's the end of it. You have to realise we are just clowns for hire. After I had success it was great, at first, not to worry about money. It was on my mind when I was growing up.

All of Sicily is a dimension of the imagination.

Che resta di una mostra, se non il catalogo?

Whatever else may divide us, Europe is our common home; a common fate has linked us through the centuries, and it continues to link us today.

She had watched Rome burn down, taking with it her own world.

Francois I had commanded that the French speak one tongue, and the Langue d'oil triumphed over the Langue d'oc.

The Italian Renaissance was as much an age of culture and learning as of violence and deceit.

Do you believe, she went on, that the past dies? Yes, said Margaret. Yes, if the present cuts its throat.

It is striking how history, when resting on the memory of men, always touches the bounds of mythology.

We see before us a series of events which follow one another and are conditioned by one another. I say 'conditioned' I certainly do not mean conditioned through absolute necessity. The important point is that human freedom makes its appearance everywhere, and the greatest attraction of history lies in the fact that it deals with the scenes of that freedom.

We're vulnerable to repeating history, especially if we don't know what's driving us. For example, it may be a family tradition to marry someone with addiction problems, or who is an injured bird in need of caretaking. Or, you may be drawn to guys who remind you of your distant, unavailable father -- or your ill-tempered mother -- with the unconscious belief that you can take an old story, and through the power of your love, give it a new, happy ending.

I had a go at changing history - maybe not all by myself - I fought at the battle of Normandy, I slogged through the Ardennes, and I celebrated the liberation of Paris on the streets with beautiful French girls throwing flowers at me. I said good-bye to my first true love and discovered what I really wanted to do with my life.

We may be through with our past, but the past isn't through with us.

the value of a personal fortune is better understood in relation to the total gross national product of an individual's era. By that measure, Carnegie was worth $112 billion in his day, far ahead of Bill Gates ($85 billion), Sam Walton ($42 billion), or Warren Buffett ($31 billion).

Daniel Maclise (whose 1839 oil of Dickens hangs today at the National Portrait Gallery).

Paris was the cross-roads of the world.

Facing me was a stone pillar, half hidden in the grass, some worn hieroglyphs carved down its side. The hillside rose right behind in a tangle of trees. Laboriously I read the characters one by one: 'Old — Barrier — of — Shirakawa'. It had taken me five and a half hours.

The word, 'cube', comes directly from the Arabic, Kaaba.

Machiavelli himself famously put it: "All armed prophets have conquered, and unarmed prophets have come to grief."9

The great British philosopher and historian R. G. Collingwood maintained in The Idea of History that to write well about a historical figure, you need both empathy and imagination. By this he did not mean spinning tales out of thin air, but taking what is known and examining it in the full context of time and place, following the strands of the story until they begin to intertwine and establish a thick braid of reality.