Quotes About History

If I had been elected president in 1948, history would be vastly different. I believe we would have stemmed the growth of Big Government, which had begun with the New Deal and culminated with the Great Society.

Every major technological step forward has profoundly changed human society - that's how we know they're major, even if we don't always realise it at the time. Farming created cities. Writing, followed eventually by printing, vastly increased the preservation and transmission of cultural information across time and space.

The writing was vastly superior to almost anything that was on the air. It's one of the great shows. It was an important show... 'St. Elsewhere' was one of the great shows in the history of television.

The Vatican is a dagger in the heart of Italy.

The Vatican takes your breath away.

I've been to the Vatican more than anyplace else outside this country in the world. I am mesmerized by it.

Vatican City is a bit overrated in my opinion - no offence to the Vatican.

Walking into the Ryman with Lester Flatt was the equivalent of walking into the Vatican with the pope.

Vatican II and the Space/Information Age began in the same eye blink of history, with John XXIII's opening speech of Vatican II on Oct. 11, 1962, following John F. Kennedy's call for a round trip to the moon a month earlier.

Musicals spring forth from minstrelsy, vaudeville, melodramas; it was all these things combined to create the form.

I'm a fan of old vaudeville theaters.

Indeed, the night sky is the part of our environment that's been common to all cultures throughout human history. All have gazed up at the 'vault of heaven' and interpreted it in their own way.

In 1955-56, Saint Joseph's won the first Big Five championship, compiled a 23-6 overall record, and entered its first postseason competition ever - the National Invitation Tournament - finishing third. That season's success seemed to vault St. Joe's into the national collegiate basketball scene, and it has been there since.

It is a remarkable fact that smallpox, a scourge for thousands of years, has now vanished from the earth, except for two tiny vials, one locked in a highly secure facility at the Centers for Disease Control, in Atlanta, and another stored in a similarly secure vault in Siberia.

I played Vegas at the age of 16 years old, in 1959.

I find that when I come upon something that I think is a historical revelation, I have the sort of adrenaline rush that I imagine a gambler gets in Las Vegas when he hits the jackpot. It's still tremendously exciting to me, and I think all of my peers in the business feel the same way.

Incredibly, almost every hotel I ever played in Vegas was blown up shortly afterward: The Dunes, The Sands, The Landmark, The Aladdin, The Frontier, The Hacienda, The Stardust - all were imploded.

Las Vegas, New Mexico has had a lot of great movies shot there.

I had worked in politics with Johnson and Nixon before becoming a historian and biographer. I kept discovering these dirtier, murkier threads in American politics that led back to Vegas' gambling interests and criminal connections.

Harlem for me is Atlanta, Las Vegas, and Washington, D.C., in one place. You have very significant churches that have had national ramifications. At the same time, you have politics. On top of all that, you have entertainment because you have 70 years of music that came out of here, and if you scratch that, gangsterism happens.

Nobody realizes that Mormons were the first Americans to settle Las Vegas.

I'm totally, totally into old Vegas.

Pompeii was an incredibly corrupt city. Pompeii was the Las Vegas of the Roman Empire.

It's a touchy subject, but as a Southerner, you can't ignore our history any more than a Renaissance painter can ignore the Virgin Mary. And it's impossible to drive down a road or eat a vegetable or pass a church without being reminded of slavery.