Quotes About History

Living in a castle is objectively romantic.

Historical seen, said Alice, people have almost always have whrong when they have said that.

She ruminated, again, on the eternal return, the widening gyre, that seemed to govern human history. There is a tide in the affairs of men. A slack tide, that heaves up wrack and slime and rotting seaweed and deposits them on the sand, like a cat leaving the corpse of a rat on your doorstep. Then it slinks back in search of more.

I have a hard time believing that the history of the universe is being written by a talking rabbit," Eliot said. "Though that would explain a lot." It

The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals.

The silver years of the Chatwins are long ago now, and the years since have been forged from baser metals. You

If Aristotle and his pupil Alexander the Great were brought back to life today, they would believe themselves in the country of the gods and not of men. Ten lives would not suffice Aristotle to assimilate all the knowledge that has been accumulated on earth since his death, and Alexander would perhaps be able to realize his dream and conquer the world.

The Futurists?.... Well, of course, they are already past.

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us.

So we made some big plans to be Sonny Boy's band and sat down to some good barbecue in a place I'd been eating in all my life in the black part of town. We ordered sandwiches, coleslaw, and some sodas. While we waited, someone asked Sonny Boy whether he'd known Robert Johnson. "Knew him?" Sonny Boy asked incredulously. "Boy, Robert Johnson died in my arms!

The history of the race is but that of the individual "writ large".

Except in the rare cases of great dynamic thinkers whose thoughts are as turning-points in the history of our race, it is by Style that writers gain distinction, by Style they secure their immortality.

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, (Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,) Black body swinging in the southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

All the candy corn that was ever made was made in 1911.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards," the Queen remarked.

History balances the frustration of how far we have to go with the satisfaction of how far we have come. It teaches us tolerance for the human shortcomings and imperfections which are not uniquely of our generation, but of all time.

Construed as a means instead of an end, history is the weapon with which we defend the future against the past.

To conceive of an education as a commodity (as if it were a polo pony or an Armani suit) is to construe the idea of democracy as the freedom of a market instead of a freedom of the mind. I can understand why the mistake is both easy and convenient to make, but unless we stop telling ourselves that America is best understood as the sum of its gross domestic product, we stand little chance of re-imagining our history or reengineering our schools.

Traditionalists are pessimists about the future and optimists about the past.

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers.

Layer upon layer, past times preserve themselves in the city until life itself is finally threatened with suffocation; then, in sheer defense, modern man invents the museum.

In the working of this parallel and in the tracing of the archetypal machine through later Western history, I found that many obscure irrational manifestations in our own highly mechanized and supposedly rational culture became strangely clarified. For in both cases, immense gains in valuable knowledge and usable productivity were cancelled out by equally great increases in ostentatious waste, paranoid hostility, insensate destructiveness, hideous random extermination.

Too easily have historians imputed war chiefly to man's savage past, and have looked upon war as an incursion of so-called primitive nomads, the 'have-nots,' against normally 'peaceful' centers of industry and trade. Nothing could be further from the historic truth. War and domination, rather than peace and co-operation, were ingrained in the original structure of the ancient city.

Let us not forget that the same demands for accurate artillery fire resulted in the invention of the modern computer.