Quotes About History

Some 110,000 witch trials occurred at this time in Europe, roughly half of them ending in conviction and execution

Although some people think I am a romantic novelist I have always thought of myself as a rather gritty radical historian.

Tell my daughter Elizabeth -- no! Tell all my daughters, everywhere, in all the ages yet to come. Tell them how I died, and why. And tell them to remember this: the future is unwritten. Know your rights.

You're very old, aren't you?" "Just as old as my tongue and a little older than my teeth.

I am both a realist and a student of History. Mankind has never learned from History.

The problem with allowing God a role in the history of life is not that science would cease, but rather that scientists would have to acknowledge the existence of something important which is outside the boundaries of natural science.

No war in American history is in greater need of a politically incorrect—another word for honest—treatment than the Vietnam War, because the people who misreported the war, hammered vile lies about it into our national consciousness, and now tout its supposed "lessons" are the very same people who created "political correctness" in the first place.

Even Philip Jones Griffiths, whose portrayal of suffering Vietnamese civilians forms perhaps the best photographic testament of the war, has said, "Your job is to record it all for history. You can't not feel involved, but you have to steel yourself and do your job, take your photographs. That's what you're there for. It's no use crying. You can't focus with tears in your eyes. It's better to do the breaking down later in the darkroom.

The solution to entrapment in the narcissistic hothouse of self is to not relinquish autobiographical writing, but to expand the self by bringing one's curiosity to interface with more and more history and the present world.

source material for wider reception. Indeed, when we consider how few masters of theology there were in the early Church, how small was their reading public, yet how great was their influence upon the course of history, we realize that a work can, by devious ways, profoundly affect people who have never laid eyes upon it. A single book, were it greatly to influence one man in a position of authority, could thus indirectly alter the course of a nation;

The changing conditions of history touch only the surface of the show.

After checking into the Hotel Monaco in downtown Seattle, Dana walked to Yesler Way, a steep street known as Skid Road in the 1850s, when the area was teeming with trees and a chute was used to skid logs to Henry Yesler's sawmill. When Seattle's city center moved north, the area became a dilapidated haven for drunks and derelicts and went from being called Skid Road to Skid Row, a term eventually used all over America to refer to a down-and-out section of a town or city.

still behave as if they've been "colonized.

Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.

Nothing fails like success nothing is so defeated as yesterday's triumphant Cause.

Well, the man who first translated the bible into English was burned at the stake, and they've been at it ever since. Must be all that adultery, murder and incest. But not to worry. It's back on the shelves.

No country in history ever sent mothers of toddlers off to fight enemy soldiers until the United States did this in the Iraq war.

History offers no evidence for the proposition that the assignment of women to military combat jobs is the way to win wars, improve combat readiness, or promote national security.

Poor as the poor myself, I cling tight, like them, to demeaning hopes; like them, every day of my life I fight/just to live/Yet in my disheartening condition as one of the dispossessed, I still possess--and it's the most thrilling of bourgeois possessions, the ultimate state of being. Yet as I possess history, I am possessed by it, I am enlightened by it: but what good is the light?

Yo soy una fuerza del pasado

A quanto pare, tutta la storia umana non fa altro che ripeterci una cosa: è solo ciò che è stato.

The essence of memory is not in the storage of information, but in the emotions we hold, in the meaning we give to our recollections, in relationships that, because we remember them, stay alive. The friends of my childhood, the pain of a goodbye, the meeting with a special person, a wonderful September afternoon, and so forth—all these are not merely items I keep in an archive. They are vital ingredients of my history.

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

If an historian were to relate truthfully all the crimes, weaknesses and disorders of mankind, his readers would take his work for satire rather than for history.