Quotes About History

Roquentin wonders if he could do the same as the man who wrote the tune. Not in music, but in the realm of art. Not a history book, because that is about what has existed, and existence is pointless, is not necessary.

The English and the French have not a single memory in common. Everything that London suffered with pride, Paris suffered in shame and despair. It is important for us to learn to speak of ourselves without emotion

The letters I had inscribed on it were not even dry yet and already they belonged to the past.

Un roi doit avoir les mêmes souvenirs que ses sujets.

I think in some parts of our English history we've had huge amounts of almost too much great comedy. You kind of wonder how so much great work could come out of one country.

My work was entirely nonfiction.

Human history is work history. The heroes of the people are work heroes.

History isn't a seesaw. If you have a really bad regime on one side, the actions on the other side don't automatically become good. It doesn't work that way.

I will try to work for greater reconciliation, cooperation and peace in North East Asia based on correct perception of history.

Reconciliation takes time. Sometimes many decades, as the example of Europe shows. It is hard work.

My favourite all-time work of fiction: Lord of the Rings. My favourite all-time nonfiction book: Guns, Germs, and Steel. Ask me again next week, you'll get a different answer.

The definition of art has changed almost every day since the first artist created the first work at least fifty thousand years ago.

We are going to make mistakes, but none of us can become an expert in family history work without first being a novice.

Great buildings, like great mountains, are the work of centuries.

In college I had to major in something, so I was like, "Okay I like art history, so I will major in that." I never really had any ambitions to work in museums or anything, though.

A soup like this is not the work of one man. It is the result of a constantly refined tradition. There are nearly a thousand years of history in this soup.

And if any work that I have done should have value beyond my own lifetime, I believe it will be the happy labors of the decade 1869-1878.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

I work really out of mythology, so often I work out of a story that has remained lodged inside somehow, or I work out of history, you know, out of a sense of historical inevitability with characters.

July 4th is Independence Day in the U.S., and it is celebrated in a truly American way by blowing things up and taking a day off from work.

If all history is only an amplification of biography, the history of science may be most instructively read in the life and work of the men by whom the realms of Nature have been successively won.

Theology being the work of males, original sin was traced to the female.

Every fact and every work exercises a fresh persuasion over every age and every new species of man. History always enunciates new truths.

It usually takes a hundred years to make a law, and then, after it has done its work; it usually takes a hundred years to get rid of it.