Quotes About History

Independent observers believe that the Pakistan Army killed between one hundred thousand and two hundred thousand Bengalis in a nine-month period, whereas Bangladesh puts the figure at three million.

Although much thought might not have gone into creating the separate state of Pakistan, considerable effort was now expended on defining, justifying, and protecting it.

The military is Pakistan's only institution inherited from the British Raj that has proved resilient and effective. 'As the history of law, democracy, administration and education in Pakistan demonstrates, other British institutions in what is now Pakistan (and to a lesser extent India as well) failed to take root, failed to work, or have been transformed in ways that their authors would scarcely have recognized.

The obstinate refusal to consider reform proposals and the insistence on rewriting history rather than learning from it have trapped Pakistan in a vicious circle. Instead of acknowledging bad decisions and moving away from them, Pakistan's policymakers deny their bad choices; they then make further wrong decisions to support their denial, with further consequences and further denials. It is, based on the criteria defined by Tuchman, classic folly.

Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.

It is commonly said and known that each civilization has its own religion. Now my claim is that if we look deeper, the different civilizations were brought into being by the different revelations.

Muhammad adhered meticulously to the charter he forged for Medina, which - grounded as it was in the Quranic injunction, "Let there be no compulsion in religion" (2:256) - is arguably the first mandate for religious tolerance in human history.

The past is comforting, Natalie. It's comforting because we survived it.

While I respect the Judeo-Christian ethic, as well as the eastern philosophies and of course the teachings of Mohammed, I find that organized religion has corrupted those beliefs to justify countless atrocities throughout history. Were I to attend church, I'd be a hypocrite.

The superior man acquaints himself with many sayings of antiquity and many deeds of the past, in order to strengthen his character thereby.

Architecture is the very mirror of life. You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something. There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots.

Science fiction has its own history, its own legacy of what's been done, what's been superseded, what's so much part of the furniture it's practically part of the fabric now, what's become no more than a joke... and so on. It's just plain foolish, as well as comically arrogant, to ignore all this, to fail to do the most basic research.

It will appear from history that a partiality to continental states has always been destructive to the interest of this country.

Juan de Grijalva, coincidentally the first European to smoke on continental American soil

Our view of history . . . is first and foremost a guide to study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential conditions of the various social formations individually investigated before an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them.2

We know that something went wrong in the country after World War II, for most of our serious pollution problems either began in the postwar years or have greatly worsened since then. —BARRY COMMONER

Stage 1: The Industrial Era, from the early 1800s to 1945, when atmospheric CO2 exceeded the upper limit of Holocene variation; and Stage 2: The Great Acceleration, from 1945 to the present, "when the most rapid and pervasive shift in the human-environment relationship began." (They also—over-optimistically, I'd say—predicted that a third stage, "Stewards of the Earth," would begin in 2015.)

We are coming to a fork in the road in human history, where the system of global capitalism is forcing an end to the Holocene Epoch of the last 12,000 years, the geological period within which human civilisation has developed, where we have to decide between 'capitalism or the planet'. —DEL WESTON1

Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has primarily tried to bother and provoke us. To force us to see things differently. Art changes. Its very purpose, we might say, is to change, and to change us along with it.

I am skeptical about the idea that we can learn much from history, at least in the sense that knowledge of past follies will prevent us from making similar blunders in the future... And yet it is important to know what happened before, and to try and make sense of it. For if we don't, we cannot understand our own times.

A Greek has twenty-five centuries of painful history to keep is dreams in check, but there's nothing more dangerous than to give an American hope.

She reminded me of a picture in a history book of the executioner who killed on of the kings.

This volume should clear up much of the confusion regarding events of the last millennium—artistic, geopolitical, philosophical, et al.