Quotes About History

and conferred on Henry the title of Fidei Defensor, 'Defender of the Faith'. It was not supposed to be inherited, but the royal family have used it ever since.

Only in the nineteenth century did the English throne renounce its claim to the French crown.

In previous times no flesh had ever been eaten on fish days; now the people of London scorned fish as a relic of papistry.

The shires of England were unique, their boundaries lasting for more than a thousand years until the administrative reorganization of 1974.

One third, or even perhaps one half, of the population died. There had never been mortality on this scale, nor has there been since. At the best estimation a population of approximately 6 million was reduced to 3 million or 4 million. It remained at this level until the early sixteenth century.

The rise of the stricter forms of Protestantism had not yet inhibited the lavish materialism that seems to characterize Elizabethan society. This might be described as the first secular age.

The writing of history is often another way of defining chaos.

In the Victorian era, a flapper had been a child prostitute;

the first sea battle in English history took place off Sandwich, in Kent, when the invaders were rebuffed.

The kings of these territories were executed in the ritual of the 'blood eagle', whereby the lungs were ripped out of the body and draped across the shoulders so that they resembled an eagle's folded wings.

The argot that came to be used in the courts was known as 'Law French'. 'Master' and 'servant' come from the French. 'Crime' and 'treason' and 'felony' are French, as are 'money' and 'payment'. The

Streoneshalch was renamed as Whitby, and Northworthig became Derby.

Many of the developments that have been described as Norman in fact represented only the acceleration of English custom.

I came to realize that my grandmother's stories were part of time and not part of time, part of place and not part of place, part of the stuff that is stored in the mind's honeycomb.

I realized that in order to touch the woman behind the grandmother I knew, the one who never spoke in a direct way about her past, I had to bring the pain of the past into the landscape of the present.

Sooner or later everyone disguises themselves and where they have been and what they have done.

I don't want to lose you over tedious genealogy and history that must be very dim to you. This is a story of real people who lived and died, about their times and what went wrong. I shall try to be honest even when it's apparent that I am making things up, delivering scenes I couldn't have witnessed. I know the truth in my bones. And that's what I shall give you.

In fact, the poor are generally too busy making ends meet to be the vanguard of any revolution. History shows that terrorism is a largely bourgeois endeavor, from the Russian anarchists of the late nineteenth century to the German Marxists of the Baader-Meinhof Gang of the 1970s, to the apocalyptic Japanese terror cult Aum Shinrikyo of the 1990s. Islamist terrorists, it turns out, are no different.

Lithuanians and it would take more than

History has been written not by the most talented but by the most motivated.

I read a lot of history, biographies, science, and novels,' he says, ushering a reporter out the door with a hint of relief. 'I do not read management or economics.' (from an interview in the Christian Science Monitor , July 26, 1993)

This failure to ask reflects human stupidity less than it reflects human history.

But what stands out in Japanese history, as well as in today's Japanese management behavior, is the capacity for making 180-degree turns—that is, for reaching radical and highly controversial decisions.

Peter Fritzsche