Quotes About History

Jew-hating was back-of course Jew-hating was back. Soon it would be full-blown Fascism, Nazism, Stalinism. These things didn't go away. There was nowhere for them to go. They where indestructible, non-biodegradable. They waited in the great rubbish tip that was the human heart.

History's lesson is that bullies ultimately defeat themselves.

Early Greek Science: Thales to Aristotle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1970) and Greek Science after Aristotle (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973)

The Beginnings of Western Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Geocentric cosmology seems

Alexander Bird's Thomas Kuhn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000

A good short history of the development of the drift hypothesis and the final emergence of plate tectonics is given in A. Hallam, A Revolution in the Earth Sciences: From Continental Drift to Plate Tectonics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973)

Stephen Jay Gould's 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man is both amusing and horrifying when it recounts how nineteenth century anthropologists pursued craniometry

Paul de Kruif's Microbe Hunters (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1926), is still in print eighty years after it was written. I

A superbly written, insightful, and beautifully illustrated history of evolution is David Young's The Discovery of Evolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992

Perhaps the best-known example of social-constructivist history of science is the 1985 book Leviathan and the Air-Pump by Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer. Shapin and Schaffer's book focused on an important controversy from the mid-seventeenth century, the nasty dispute between scientist Robert Boyle and irascible philosopher Thomas Hobbes

Why, then, did Boyle win? Shapin and Schaffer answer that Boyle won because he played the political game much better than Hobbes, and because Hobbes was swimming against the tide of history. They argue that the emergence of a new way of organizing science was an integral part of the emergence of the new social order of Restoration society

The only way to argue this in a comprehensive way would be to adopt a universal skepticism about method. The most famous case for such skepticism is the 1975 book Against Method by maverick philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend. Feyerabend appeals to the history of science to argue that no methodological prescription has ever been consistently followed in science

An authoritative and highly readable history of atomism is Bernard Pullman's The Atom in the History of Human Thought, translated by Axel Reisinger (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Pullman traces the ups and downs of atomic theory through the centuries and shows how it finally triumphed only at the beginning of the twentieth century.

A work I failed to mention earlier that gives an excellent overview of the history of evolution, including evolutionary synthesis, is Peter J. Bowler's Evolution: The History of an Idea, third edition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003

There are several excellent general histories of scientific method. One of the most popular introductory-level books is A Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, by John Losee, third edition (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1993

There was a time when a book could be sold purely because its author had been to distant climes and had returned to tell of the exotic sights he had seen. That author was Marco Polo, and the time was the thirteenth century.

A chronicle is very different from history proper.

History is one of those marvelous and necessary illusions we have to deal with. It's one of the ways of dealing with our world with impossible generalities which we couldn't live without.

When thinking harshly on the human condition, as I so often do, my antidote is to think gently on libraries, for if human beings are capable of preserving the history of our knowledge in the form of books, there there may still be hope.

I've said often that every enterprise and organization has a memory. And those memories create a path for people to follow.

I can be a bit romantic about history, but I'm also pragmatic about the present. America cannot, of course, have open borders. We need a clear, sustainable immigration policy, one that better manages the flow of people who do not pose a threat and can contribute to our economy and culture. Immigration laws can be sensible without extinguishing the idea that brought so many here and compels so many to stay.

History shows that silence is unforgivable, for it gives bigotry license. And when meek words masquerade as moral courage, they are perceived as indifference and give the worst of human nature permission to flourish.

The faults of history cannot be undone, but if we confront them we can begin to learn, change the present, and create a better future. Discussion is a good place to start, but talking can never be enough.

Old is beautiful, but not if it is neglected.—Aldo Lorenzi, That Shop in Via Montenapoleone