Quotes About History

Webster seemed to me either a man without a past, or a man eager not to have one.

The most decorated service rabbit in history was RAF Navigation Officer Danielle 'Thumper' Rabbit, who ejected from a Tornado over Iraq when it was hit by a surface-to-air missile. She wrote about her time as a POW in Bouncing Out of Tikrit, and it was quite a good read, although critics did find fault with the overlong detail of Iraqi salad in the latter part of the book.

La seguii, e constatai che quello scavo era di natura archeologica. Dei pioli conficcati nel terreno erano collegati da una cordicella, per delimitare l'area in cui quei volontarii picconavano il suolo, cercando di fare meno rumore possibile.

Religion isn't the cause of wars, it's the excuse.

Mi padre decía que Cataluña siempre ha estado en manos de un puñado de familias. Ellos mandaban antes del franquismo, mandaron durante el franquismo, mandan después del franquismo y mandarán cuando tú y yo estemos muertos y enterrados...

Independentistas, en Cataluña, ha habido siempre desde hace un siglo: gente con mucho corazón y poca cabeza

un historiador serio y, como tal, un enemigo jurado de la industria de la memoria

Y el pasado volvió, inevitablemente.

se puede ser un buen escritor siendo una pésima persona..." "De todas las historias de la historia", escribió Jaime Gil de Biedma, "sin duda la más triste es la de España, porque termina mal

Sánchez Mazas) "Sea como fuere, lo cierto es que saludó en una seria de crónicas tituladas Italia a paso gentil, y que vio en Benito Mussolini la reencarnación de los condotieros renacentistas y en su ascensión al poder el anuncio de que el tiempo de los héroes y los poetas había vuelto a Italia

Nadie. Nadie se acuerda siquiera de por qué murieron, de por qué no tuvieron mujer e hijos y una habitación con sol; nadie, y, menos que nadie, la gente por la que pelearon.

All wars are full of stories that sound like fiction

Siempre se dice que el deporte europeo por excelencia es el fútbol, pero es mentira: el deporte europeo por excelencia es la guerra.

Segmentar la historia es realizar un ejercicio arbitrario; en rigor, es imposible precisar el origen exacto de un acontecimiento histórico, igual que es imposible precisar su exacto final: todo acontecimiento tiene su origen en un acontecimiento anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y éste en otro anterior, y así hasta el infinito, porque la historia es como la materia y en ella nada se crea ni se destruye: sólo se transforma.

José Antonio Primo de Rivera repetía como si fuera suya: «A última hora siempre ha sido un pelotón de soldados el que ha salvado la civilización».

Long years ago, we made a tryst with destiny, and now the time comes when we shall redeem our pledge, not wholly or in full measure, but very substantially. At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom. A moment comes, which comes but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance

Yet the past is ever with us and all that we are and that we have comes from the past. We are its products and we live immersed in it. Not to understand it and feel it as something living within us is not to understand the present. To combine it with the present and extend it to the future, to break from it where it cannot be so united, to make of all this the pulsating and vibrating material for thought and action—that is life.

mayor orador de la historia, Marco Tulio Cicerón, quien propuso tres objetivos para persuadir a la gente, en orden creciente de dificultad:

Oh, we're human, all right," she said. "Humans have always been very good at killing.

that old energy in the caves, you know. People who spend

Forgetting extermination is part of extermination.

Why did this [Vietnam] war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system.

We are fascinated by Ramses as Renaissance Christians were by the American Indians, those (human?) beings who had never known the word of Christ.

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