Quotes About History

Guns aren't just history's props and agents: they're history itself, spinning alternate futures in their chamber, hurling the present from their barrel, casting aside the empty shells of past

But now there are no natives – or we're the natives.

The past is an educational toy for the present. It should be discarded the moment its usefulness is outgrown.

The odds are always against you no matter what your previous history is. You have to overcome the tendency to relax.

At this point, I see the unfortunate recipient of this impromptu history lecture begin to doze and I move on to my next unwilling victim.

What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine? What did you learn in school today, Dear little boy of mine? I learned that Washington never told a lie. I learned that soldiers seldom die. I learned that everybody's free. And that's what the teacher said to me. That's what I learned in school today. That's what I learned in school.

On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Its enactment, following the longest continuous debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, enshrined into law the basic principle upon which our country was founded - that all people are created equal.

New Orleans inspires the kind of love that very few other cities do. Paris, maybe Venice, maybe, San Francisco, New York….

Thus, the armies that would slaughter each other in the 1940s in the most massive mechanized battles in history trained together in the 1920s.

But France did not have a normal government: it had a collection of caffeinated intellectuals

Citizen Alexandre Dumas, he was thenceforth known only by the name—strongly compromising at that time, especially among the people who had given it to him—of Mr. Humanity.

Knights Templar.

the Stefansplatz, where the largest spontaneous demonstration in Austrian history was held—to celebrate the Anschluss and Hitler's surprise tour of the city—in the spring of 1938.

unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written.

Nazism and use the alliance among Fascists to steer the Nazis away from the racial policies.

Hitler responded by calling Mussolini's movement "Kosher fascism.")

eclipsed and forgotten by Mussolini's brief but disastrous alliance with Hitler.

Modern versions of this argument held that American democracy was born of the slave society of rural Virginia, because slavery gave men like Washington and Jefferson the free time to better themselves and to participate in representative government.)

The repression the Republic imposed in the Vendée escalated to a level of surreal violence that dwarfed the Parisian Terror.

the concept, going back to the misty foundations of the nation, that France was the land of the free—that no one should be kept in unwilling servitude on its soil.

Fenway is the essence of baseball

Before Samuel took over from the military government, the chief administrative officer asked that he sign one of the most quoted documents in Zionist history: "Received from Major General Sir Louis J. Bols, K.C.B.—One Palestine, complete." Samuel signed.

Many years afterward, Lloyd George described the Balfour Declaration as a prize awarded by a generous and benevolent ruler to his court Jew.

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on earth. A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles changed music. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. —Robert Goizueta, chief executive of the Coca-Cola Company, April 1997