Quotes About History

But my dear sir, the United Irishmen were primarily Protestants – their leaders were Protestants. Wolfe Tone and Napper Tandy were Protestants. The Emmets, the O'Connors, Simon Butler, Hamilton Rowan, Lord Edward Fitzgerald were Protestants. And the whole idea of the club was to unite Protestant and Catholic and Presbyterian Irishmen. The Protestants it was who took the initiative.

Patrick O'Brian

Queen Anne's Gift

A people that has had its ancient laws and customs taken from it, whose language and history count for nothing, and whose temples have been sacked and thrown down is apt to be morose

His legend will be written down, eventually, by those who are troubled by it.

The old Greek saviours simply changed names and became Christian saints

no one bears witness for the witness

The modern fitness scene is largely defined by the presence of pumped up, muscle-bound bodybuilders, expensive exercise machines, and steroids. It's wasn't always this ways. There was a time when men trained to become inhumanly strong using nothing but their own bodyweight. No weights. No machines. No drugs. Nothing

Rodney Stark puts it this way: "To expect to learn anything about important theological problems from Richard Dawkins or Daniel Dennett is like expecting to learn about medieval history from someone who had only read Robin Hood.

We often like to think of World War II as a triumph of freedom over totalitarianism. We conveniently forget that the Soviet Union was also one of the winners.

Cobol, for all its sometime popularity, does not seem to have any intellectual descendants. It is an evolutionary dead- end a Neanderthal language.

If you understand McCarthy's eval, you understand more than just a stage in the history of languages. These ideas are still the semantic core of Lisp today. So studying McCarthy's original paper shows us, in a sense, what Lisp really is. It's not something that McCarthy designed so much as something he discovered. It's not intrinsically a language for AI or for rapid prototyping, or any other task at that level. It's what you get (or one thing you get) when you try to axiomatize computation.

If you look at history, it seems that most people who got rich by creating wealth did it by developing new technology. You just can't fry eggs or cut hair fast enough.

Naturally wealth had a bad reputation. Two things changed. The first was the rule of law. For most of the world's history, if you did somehow accumulate a fortune, the ruler or his henchmen would find a way to steal it. But in medieval Europe something new happened. A new class of merchants and manufacturers began to collect in towns.10 Together they were able to withstand the local feudal lord.

Understanding this may help to answer an important question: why Europe grew so powerful. Was it something about the geography of Europe? Was it that Europeans are somehow racially superior? Was it their religion? The answer (or at least the proximate cause) may be that the Europeans rode on the crest of a powerful new idea: allowing those who made a lot of money to keep it.

the way to get rich was not to create wealth, but to serve a ruler powerful enough to appropriate it. This started to change in Europe with the rise of the middle class.

If we were talking about Europe in 1000, or most of the third world today, the standard misquotation would be spot on.

I HAVE been around at a time when important things needed to be done

Most popular accounts of science and many philosophical analyses are therefor chimeras, pure and simple. They are distorted and misleading as a history of art which regards paintings as natural phenomena of a special kind without ever mentioning the individuals lingering in their neighborhood when they first appear.

Não sou daqueles que planejam acuradamente cada vírgula que escrevem e cada sopro de ar que exalam, de modo que a história, isto é, os idiotas de amanhã possam admirar sua perfeição.

Marx finished his destructive passage with an exhortation to history, to philosophy, to law, to politics to undertake the secular righteous "task" to "establish the truth of this world." What truth? That truth, alas, was Marx's "truth." Ye shall be as gods.

In April 1919, only weeks into Palmer's tenure as attorney general, anarchists sent a booby-trapped bomb to his home. The bomb was intercepted and defused, but a few months later they successfully exploded another bomb on his porch. It killed one of the plotters but failed to injure Palmer, his wife, or his child, who were home in bed at the time.

It will be necessary to repeat the year 1793," wrote Lenin. "After achieving power, we'll be considered monsters, but we couldn't care less."22 Lenin and his self-described group of "glorious Jacobins" would monstrously do just that, and, indeed, could not care less.

In 1989, Ronald Reagan's final year in the White House