Quotes About History

Perhaps the best definition for the inhabitants of an early city is that they are a permanently captive farm population.

Only now that village ways are rapidly disappearing throughout the world can we estimate all that the city owes to them for the vital energy and loving nature that made possible man's further development.

Through the army, in fact, the standard model of the megamachine was transmitted from culture to culture.

We were all miners in our family. My father was a miner. My mother is a miner. These are miner's hands, but we were all artists, I suppose, really. But I was the first one who had the urge to express myself on paper rather than at the coalface.

Children have a great urge to learn about dinosaurs.

So the history of discovery, particularly cosmic discovery, but discovery in general, scientific discovery, is one where at any given moment, there's a frontier. And there tends to be an urge for people, especially religious people, to assert that across that boundary, into the unknown, lies the handiwork of God. This shows up a lot.

Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.

When historians write the last pages of their books, and the producers of history documentaries sit down to edit the final minutes of their programmes, there is often a strong urge to look to the future and emphasise the positive.

Imagine the situation between Israel and Palestine. It's such a big mess. You can be on one side or the other. But what's clear is that there's an urgent need for a solution there and that's been dragging on for so long.

I think one of the bigger issues with modern-day people is that we don't give enough credit to people from history as being real. We almost treat them as these rarified beings that didn't exist the way that we do with emotions and urges and drives.

When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said 'Let us pray.' We closed our eyes. When we opened them we had the Bible and they had the land.

From the heights of these pyramids, forty centuries look down on us.

They made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.

History teaches us that unity is strength, and cautions us to submerge and overcome our differences in the quest for common goals, to strive, with all our combined strength, for the path to true African brotherhood and unity.

Folk music takes us back to the roots of our culture.

History is the interpretation of the significance that the past has for us.

The history of the past interests us only in so far as it illuminates the history of the present.

Our ignorance of history causes us to slander our own times.

What's the shelf life of a 1931 movie? If it still exists, there will always be film buffs and a niche audience who will want to see it. But in terms of people even understanding in common usage, some of the words we use to describe these movies, I don't know how long that's going to last.

I teach at USC, and it's obvious to anyone who teaches college students that they don't cover much modern history and certainly not the modern presidency.

I love old books. They tell you stories about their use. You can see where the fingerprints touched the pages as they held the book open. You can see how long they lingered on each page by the finger stains.

History is a tool used by politicians to justify their intentions.

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

I am Al Gore, and I used to be the next president of the United States of America.