Quotes About History

There are people who, like houses, are beautiful in dilapidation.

Today the average lifetime is over seventy years, long enough for a great number of accomplishments. But this development has occurred within the present century. Before that, people tended to die much younger than they do today, and among those early deaths were those of many brilliant and talented people who had much to give the world. It is those people to whom I reach out. It is to them I offer the opportunity to return.

now he saw the familiar wide river beside the path differently. He saw all of the light and color and history it contained and carried in its slow - moving water; and he knew that there was an Elsewhere from which it came, and an Elsewhere to which it was going

My mother, she was twenty in 1979, she supported Khomeini, she wanted to throw out the Shah. But now she cries all the time. Ten times a day she says to me, what did I do? What did I do? It wasn't meant to be like this. But there is nothing we can do.

Many of the passengers were a generation or two older than me, men and women who would remember the pre-revolution era; they had probably supported the overthrow of the Shah at the time. Considering that over ninety-eight per cent of the population had voted for the creation of an Islamic Republic back in 1979, it was highly likely that most of these quiet, tea-drinking folk around me had ticked the YES box in that fateful referendum. I wondered if they regretted that decision now.

The marriage tie becomes possessed of a history and takes to itself traditions. This history and these traditions form a great fund, to which changing conditions and growing imagination constantly add. And the traditions, more especially, bear heavily upon the individual, overmastering his natural expression of the love instinct and forcing him to an artificial expression of that love instinct. He loves, not as his savage forbears loved, but as his group loves.

Show me a man with a tattoo and I'll show you a man with an interesting past.

Life creeps slowly upward.... When some forgotten inventor of the older world smote his rival or enemy with a branch of wood and found that it was good and thereafter made a practice of smiting rivals and enemies with branches of wood, then, and on that day, artificiality may be said to have begun. Then, and on that day, was begun a revolution destined to change the history of life. Then, and on that day, was laid the cornerstone of that most tremendous of artifices, CIVILIZATION!

The church always arrives on the scene a little breathless and a little late.

Down to the Plymouth Rock, that had been to their feet as a doorstep Into a world unknown -- the cornerstone of a nation!

Every author has the whole past to contend with; all the centuries are upon him. He is compared with Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton.

There is a difference, Mr. President, between Christian extremism and Muslim extremism. Christian extremism was in the 1400s. Muslim extremism was Wednesday.

History is not only a particular branch of knowledge, but a particular mode and method of knowledge in other branches.

History, to be above evasion or dispute, must stand on documents, not on opinions.

The light that has guided us is still unquenched, and the causes that have carried us so far in the van of free nations have not spent their power; because the story of the future is written in the past, and that which hath been is the same thing that shall be.

The history of institutions is often a history of deception and illusions; for their virtue depends on the ideas that produce and on the spirit that preserves them, and the form may remain unaltered when the substance has passed away.

I exhort you never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude, but to try others by the final maxim that governs your own lives, and to suffer no man and no cause to escape the undying penalty which history has the power to inflict on wrong.

The vividness and force with which we trace the motion of history depends on the degree to which we look beyond persons and fix our gaze on things.

Nothing is more untrue than the famous saying of an ancient historian, that power is retained by the same arts by which it is acquired; untrue at least for men, though truer in the case of nations.

The inner reality of history is so unlike the back of the cards, and it takes so long to get at it, which does not prevent us from disbelieving what is current as history, but makes us wish to sift it, and dig through mud to solid foundations.

History is not a burden on the memory but an illumination of the soul.

And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that.

Save for the wild force of Nature, nothing moves in this world that is not Greek in its origin.

Pythagoras, Locke, Socrates -- but pages might be filled up, as vainly as before, with the sad usage of all sorts of sages, who in his life-time, each was deemed a bore! The loftiest minds outrun their tardy ages.