Quotes About History

Because history is not the background—history is the stage! And you are on the stage! Oh, how sickening is your appalling ignorance of your own times!

Our homeland was America. Then the Republicans nominated Lindbergh and everything changed.

Why is it," the unhappy teacher finally asked, "that for centuries people have hated you Jews?" Amy rose to her feet. She was stunned. "Don't ask me that!" the girl said—"ask the madmen who hate us!" And she had nothing further to do with Miss Giddings as a friend—or with anyone else who asked her anything about what they couldn't possibly understand.

He had learned the worst lesson that life can teach—that it makes no sense. And when that happens the happiness is never spontaneous again. It is artificial and, even then, bought at the price of an obstinate estrangement from oneself and one's history.

They were still talking about polio, now by recalling its frightening precursors. His grandmother was remembering when whooping cough victims were required to wear armbands and how, before a vaccine was developed, the most dreaded disease in the city was diphtheria. She remembered getting one of the first smallpox vaccinations. The site of the injection had become seriously infected, and she had a large, uneven circle of scarred flesh on her upper right arm as a result.

Never before—the great refrain of 1942.

There is also the fact that premodern lobster was cooked dead and then preserved, usually packed in salt or crude hermetic containers.

This was, keep in mind, the tail end of the era of the mainframe computers, tape- and card-based data storage, & c., which now seems almost Flinstonianly remote.

One or two factoids. Plato, né Aristocles, is c. 427–347 BCE; Aristotle is 384–322 BCE (compare Socrates at c. 470–399 and Zeno at c. 490–435). Aristotle was a former star pupil in Plato's Academy, the motto over the front door of which happened to be LET NO ONE WHO IS IGNORANT OF GEOMETRY ENTER HERE. 18

I guess… it was just a shocking event. We're not used to someone like him being President." Here, the student reveals an availability bias in which we expect future outcomes to look like what has gone before.

To put this immense time period in perspective, the Thirteenth Amendment—which abolished slavery—was ratified on December 6, 1865. We will have to live on this continent more than eighty additional years before the time after slavery will match in length the time during slavery. And if you include the century of Jim Crow that existed before the passage of the Civil Rights Acts in 1964, formal legal subjugation of African Americans endured for a stunning 345 years.

But the thought leaders on talk radio and Fox do more than shape opinion. Backed by their own wing of the book-publishing industry and supported by think tanks that increasingly function as public-relations agencies, conservatives have built a whole alternative knowledge system, with its own facts, its own history, its own laws of economics.

The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting," wrote the Czech novelist Milan Kundera.

Their faces were set, determined; there was no give in them. For countless centuries men like these had held the Drenai Empire together.

These are only the most prominent examples. Facebook's history of personal data abuse is extensive, and consistent. Given the chance, you can be sure Facebook will abuse users' data — no matter what permissions the users think they gave, and no matter the promises Facebook may have made to regulators.

Every dictator in history, from Philip of Macedon to the Tyrant of Asia, claimed to be—and probably was, in his beginnings—motivated solely by benevolence.

I think she had a lot of history that she wished she didn't. As near as I can tell, Earth is a terrible place, and I'm glad we don't live there.

the proper study of humanity is humanity itself. History is not just old news. It's people.

Pope Sixtus the Fifth?

Totalitarians never cease trying to rewrite history to their their own liking, but history is a stubborn old bastard that always outlives these feeble fantasies.

Whenever I read history, I feel as though I am hopelessly surrounded by hopelessly stupid people.

The Army isn't what it used to be," I lamented to General Cushman one day. "It never was," he replied.

A universal law has often operated through much of American history. When race slavery, or other systems of racial inequality declined, racism tended to increase, and new forms of racial violence were quick to follow.

the two southern cultures strongly supported every American war no matter what it was about or who it was against.