Quotes About History

A statement on the political responsibility of the critic: the critic must attempt to fully realize, and take responsibility for, the unspoken, unrepresented pasts that haunt the historical present.

It is certain that during the sixteenth century, and the years that preceded and followed it, poisoning was brought to a perfection unknown to modern chemistry, as history itself will prove. Italy, the cradle of modern science, was, at this period, the inventor and mistress of these secrets, many of which are now lost.

Peter the Hermit, Calvin, and Robespierre, each at an interval of three hundred years and all three from the same region, were, politically speaking, the Archimedean screws of their age, at each epoch a Thought which found its fulcrum in the self-interest of mankind.

Exist? dou? fa?ete ale istoriei, cea oficial?, mincinoas?, care ne este adus? la cuno?tiin?? pentru a fi înv??at? – ad usum delphini – ?i fa?eta secret?, în care se g?sesc adev?ratele cauze ale evenimentelor.

It is in the nature of things that the man should be identified with the company in which history finds him.

Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack.

Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

Ojiisan says if you want to understand a people, look at their language. The words write the history, not the other way around.

on Huang. The 1940s were Silver Dollar's golden years, as all

Kaysone Phoumvihan

All the able-bodied males, the real farmers of China, had been taken out of agricultural production to tend the backyard steel furnaces.

Anyway, weren't women allowed to be sexist for the next two thousand years or so, until they'd evened up the score?

Sometimes she felt like she was always dragging the memories of these relationships along with her, like three old tin cans on a string.

I seriously don't understand how men came to rule the world," she'd said to her sister, Bridget, this morning,

If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance,"' quotes Veronika. 'George Bernard Shaw.

It was extraordinary how tumultuous historical moments could be replayed right here in this ordinary little moment as she drove down the Pacific Highway

Cecilia sipped her tea and imagined herself going back through time and putting that Khrushchev in his place.

Damn that Berlin Wall, and that Cold War, and whoever it was who sat there back in nineteen forty-whenever-it-was, mulling over the problem of what to do with those ungrateful Germans; the guy who suddenly clicked his fingers and said, "Got it, by Jove! We'll build a great big bloody wall and keep the buggers in!

Did you know that some people wish the Berlin Wall had never come down?" said Esther. "That's weird, isn't it? Why would you want to be stuck behind a wall?

It was all because of the Berlin Wall. If it weren't for the Berlin Wall, Cecilia would never have found the letter, and then she wouldn't be sitting here, at the kitchen table, willing herself not to rip it open.

Every conversation with her mother was fraught with danger. It was as if they were former players from competing teams who shared a long and violent history.

If only you were born a hundred years ago, when you could have gone through days of natural labour before bleeding naturally to death,

Esther would know who first came up with the idea for the Berlin Wall. Esther would probably be able to give her his date of birth. It would have been a man, of course. Only a man could come up with something so ruthless, so essentially stupid and yet brutally effective.

Most historians agree that the decline of the Great Library of Alexandria was due to what endangers libraries of the present day--general indifference and bureaucratic neglect.