Quotes About History

There is a good saying to the effect that when a new book appears one should read an old one.

In harsh or melancholy epochs free men may always take comfort from the grand lesson of history, that tyrannies cannot last except among servile races. The years which seem endless to those who endure them are but a flick of mischance in the journey. New and natural hopes leap from the human heart as every spring revives the cultivated soil and rewards the faithful, patient husbandmen.

When York's son, hitherto Earl of March, learned that his father's cause had devolved upon him he did not shrink. He fell upon the Earl of Wiltshire and the Welsh Lancastrians, and on February 2, 1461, at the Battle of Mortimer's Cross, near Hereford, he beat and broke

St Patrick was a Roman Briton of good family dwelling probably in the Severn valley.

Later these tales would be retold and embellished by the genius of Mallory, Spenser, and Tennyson.

Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee, two of the. noblest men ever born on the American continent.

No one can tell that he may not some day set a stone rolling or take or neglect some ordinary step which in its consequences will alter the history of the world.

In two or three minutes Mr. Roosevelt came through. "Mr. President, what's this about Japan?" "It's quite true," he replied. "They have attacked us at Pearl Harbour. We are all in the same boat now.

But you ought to let the Jews have Jerusalem; it is they who made it famous.

Thereafter mighty forces were adrift, the void was open, and into that void after a pause there strode a maniac of ferocious genius, the repository and expression of the most virulent hatreds that have ever corroded the human breast—Corporal Hitler.

Battles are the principal milestones in secular history. Modern opinion resents this uninspiring truth, and historians often treat the decisions of the field as incidents in the dramas of politics and diplomacy. But great battles, won or lost, change the entire course of events, create new standards of values, new moods, new atmospheres, in armies and in nations, to which all must conform.

all that is in the past, and the past belongs to God.

In the first three months of actual fighting from the last week in August to the end of November, when the German drive against the Channel ports had come to an end and the first great invasion was definitely arrested, the French lost in killed, prisoners and wounded 854,0001 men. In

Gandhi... ought to be lain bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and then trampled on by an enormous elephant with the new Viceroy seated on its back. Gandhi-ism and everything it stands for will have to be grappled with and crushed.

If food is scarce, why isn't Gandhi dead yet?

I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes. It would spread a lively terror.

In this period, almost equal to that which separates us from the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, well-to-do persons in Britain lived better than they ever did until late Victorian times. From the year 400 till the year 1900 no one had central heating and very few had hot baths.

The grass soon grows over a battlefield but never over a scaffold.

Cuando, el 18 de julio de 1871, se consolidó el triunfo de los alemanes por la proclamación del Imperio alemán en el palacio de Versalles, se abrió un nuevo volumen de la historia de Europa: «Europa —se dijo entonces— ha perdido un ama de casa y ha ganado un dueño».

the Bermuda Assembly, which is the oldest Parliamentary institution in the Western Hemisphere.

In the autumn of 1942, at the peak of the struggle for Guadalcanal, only three American aircraft-carriers were afloat; a year later there were fifty; by the end of the war there were more than a hundred.

The crimes of the vanquished find their background and their explanation, though not, of course, their pardon, in the follies of the victors. Without these follies crime would have found neither temptation nor opportunity.

the Battle of Alamein, called Desert Victory.

War is mainly a catalogue of blunders