Quotes About History

Mythology is much better stuff than history. It has form; logic; a message.

I have been reading history all my life, and am sharply aware that I know very little. I have an exaggerated respect for historians--certain historians; they seem to me grounded in a way that most of us are not, possessed of an extra sense by virtue of access to times and places when things were done differently. They have--can have--heightened perception.

History is not so much memory as collective evidence. It is what has happened, what is thought to have happened, what some claim to have happened. The collective past is fact and fabrication--much like our private pasts. There is no received truth, just a tenuous thread of events amid a swirl of dispute and conflicting interpretation. But... the past is real. This is simplistic, but also, for me, awe-inspiring. I am silenced when I think about it: the great ballast of human existence.

he started to talk about the Paleolithic, about cave art, about the way in which the term art is itself an anachronism since those who created these images could not have been doing so with any understanding of the concept of art as we know it.

I cannot write chronologically of Egypt. Ancient Egypt. So-called ancient Egypt. In my history of the world – this realistic kaleidoscopic history – Egypt will have its proper place as the complacent indestructible force that has perpetuated itself in the form of enough carved stone, painted plaster, papyri, granite, gold leaf, lapis lazulis, bits of pot and fragments of wood to fill the museums of thew world. Egypt is not then but now, conditioning the way we look at things.

Laszlo's histrionics, which induce pursed lips and heavy silences in Lisa or in Sylvia, have been for me the breath of alien other worlds; they evoke the tumultuous unfettered society of Eastern Europe - languages I do not speak, cities I do not know, saints and tyrants and forests and vampires, a past that is more myth than history and all the better for it.

Jane--it's history, all this. I say that I have always thought history to be of great relevance.

What she was retreating from was any profundity of feeling and therefore any commitment more intense than light church attendance and an interest in roses.... History is of course crammed with people like Mother, who are just sitting it out.

The cast is assembling; the plot thickens. Mother, Gordon, Sylvia. Jasper. Lisa. Mother will drop out before long, retiring gracefully and with minimum fuss after an illness in 1962. Others, as yet unnamed, will come and go. Some more than others; one above all. In life as in history the unexpected lies waiting, grinning from around corners. Only with hindsight are we wise about cause and effect.

The jumbled brick and stone of the city's landscape is a medley of style in which centuries and decades rub shoulders in a disorder that denies the sequence of time.

The C in vitamin C indicates that it was the third vitamin ever identified.

A change as small as the position of a bond—the link between atoms in a molecule—can lead to enormous differences in properties of a substance and in turn influence the course of history. So this book is not about the history of chemistry; rather it is about chemistry in history.

Like history, experience of life teaches us nothing. True experience consists in reducing one's contact with reality whilst at the same time intensifying one's analysis of that contact.

George Washington's Sacred Fire intends to convince you that when all the available evidence is considered, the only viable conclusion is that George Washington was a Christian and not a Deist.

Skeptics today often claim that George Washington was not a real Christian, but in our view, the burden of proof is on them to explain why he was consistently in church throughout his life, why the churches he was part of were entirely orthodox in terms of the Trinity and the doctrine of Christ, and why he attended churches where the Bible was regularly preached on Sunday.

Indeed, given the facts, the burden of proof is not to prove that Washington was a Christian; the burden of proof is to prove that he was a skeptic who nevertheless sought to act like a Christian believer!

The skeptics who argue for Washington the Deist must explain his lifelong and heartfelt commitment to Christian missionary work.

Let's begin by noting that Washington historian Rupert Hughes is wrong when he writes in 1926, "… there is no direct allusion to Christ, and the word Christ has been found in none of Washington's almost countless autographs." 3 For George Washington wrote in 1779, "You do well to wish to learn our arts and ways of life, and above all, the religion of Jesus Christ. These will make you a greater and happier people than you are." 4

None of it seemed very real, but I suppose that's the trouble with history. It's the one thing we have to make up for ourselves.

As a result of Malory's plangent and often elaborate prose, the song of Arthur has never ended. Le Morte d'Arthur inspired both Milton and Dryden with dreams of Arthurian epic, and in the nineteenth century Tennyson revived the themes of Malory in Idylls of the King. William Morris wrote The Defence of Guenevere , and Algernon Swinburne composed Tristram of Liones. The Round Table was reconstituted in the libraries of nineteenth-century England.

The names of the English have changed. Before the invasion of William I the common names were those such as Leofwine, Aelfwine, Siward and Morcar. After the Norman arrival these were slowly replaced by Robert, Walter, Henry and of course William.

The fall of Venice was just a change in its historical identity. We cannot say that it was a disgrace or triumph, because we do not know who in the end is triumphant and who is disgraced.

1540 and 1547 prices rose by 46 per cent; in 1549 they had risen by another 11 per cent.

In 1076 he decreed that none of the English clergy would be allowed to marry.