Quotes About History

we can do some historical research to see how our ancestors lived. We will quickly discover that we are living in what to them would have been a dream world that we tend to take for granted things that our ancestors had to live without...

She was married to Jack before she married my father." "Correct." "But she later divorced Jack and married my father." "Also correct." "And you all lived together?" She waved her hand in the air. "It was another time. Have a seat.

Nothing can be more contemptible than to suppose public records to be true.

The strongest poison ever knownCame from Caesar's laurel crown.

The de facto censorship which leaves so many Americans functionally illiterate about the history of US foreign affairs may be all the more effective because it is not official, heavy-handed or conspiratorial, but woven artlessly into the fabric of education and media. No conspiracy is needed.

If he had wished, he could have annexed Denmark; and ended a thousand years of war and history. But Charles had no weaknesses; now and thereafter he was behaving out of a book. The first maxim of Alexanderism is never to stop; Charles continued.

All these outposts were broken in,and that which in other histories would have counted as three victories did not delay the progress of Charles for one hour

every civilization reaches a still point. The progressives can't go forward, and the conservatives can't go back. One demands continual advance, the other longs for yesterday.

Pardon, old fathers.

Was it for this the wild geese spreadThe gray wing upon every tide;For this that all that blood was shed,For this Edward Fitzgerald died,And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,All that delirium of the brave?Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Under bare Ben Bulben's headIn Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.

Whence had they come,The hand and lash that beat down frigid Rome?What sacred drama through her body heavedWhen world-transforming Charlemagne was conceived?

You that would judge me, do not judge alone this book or that, come to this hallowed place where my friends' portraits hang and look thereon Ireland's history in their lineaments trace think where man's glory most begins and ends and say my glory was I had such friends.

Why, what could she have done, being what she is? Was there another Troy for her to burn?

Romantic Ireland's dead and gone It's with O' Leary in the grave (September 1913)

Adherence to Joseph E. Johnston would be Jefferson Davis' greatest mistake of 1862-1863 and one of his greatest of the war.

Reflecting from the vantage of more than a century, we can see today how trapped the leaders of the South felt in 1860. That the snare was only partially genuine, and partially in their imaginations and fears, made it no less real to them at the time. They had to act on the basis of what they knew and believed, and the fact that subsequent events and detached dispassionate study reveal that some of their belief was chimerical does not signify.

the safest course seemed to be to stay within the sources of their own time, written at the moment by those who knew the men and witnessed their acts, and as much as possible to use the directly contemporary writings of the men themselves

South Carolina wanted to be certain that no misguided egalitarianism led to an excess of democracy. After all, that was partially what they were seceding from.

Yea, and so abundant were they in the three first centuries, that ten years constant and almost universal persecution under Dioclesian, could neither root out the Christians, nor prejudice their cause.

[History is] a tyranny over the souls of the dead - and so the imagination of the living.

We gather information by many means, but a single spy in the right place and at the right moment may change the course of history.

I did J.E.S.T. here when I was with the First

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run and often in the short one the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.