Quotes About History

FALLACY I—The first fallacy of Communism is its attempt to over-simplify history.

Whittaker Chambers, who was an American Communist spy at the time, suspected that a horrible crime against humanity was being enacted in Russia. He later wrote: "The great purge was in the most literal sense a massacre.... This great massacre, probably the greatest in history was deliberately planned and executed.... Those killed have been estimated from several hundred thousand to several million men and women. The process took about three years, 1935-1938.

It is interesting that after the Pilgrim Fathers tried communism, they abandoned it in favor of a free enterprise type of Capitalism which, over the centuries, has become more highly developed in the United States than in any other nation.

The physical sciences capitalize on the lessons of the past, but the social sciences seldom do.

Though the great artists of the past could not change the course of history, it is only through their work that we are able to break bread with the dead, and without communion with the dead a fully human life is impossible.

Man is a history-making creature who can neither repeat his past nor leave it behind.

History is, strictly speaking, the study of questions the study of answers belongs to anthropology and sociology.

Art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.

Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction.

The stars are dead. The animals will not look.We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeatedMay say Alas but cannot help or pardon.

Some books are undeservedly forgotten, none are undeservedly remembered

Always the following wind of history Of others' wisdom makes a buoyant air Till we come suddenly on pockets where Is nothing loud but us; where voices seem Abrupt, untrained, competing with no lie Our fathers shouted once.

Sanitizing the past is every bit as morally irresponsible as whitewashing atrocities in the present.

A nation is a society united by a delusion about its ancestry and a common fear of its neighbors.

Events in the past may roughly be divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

I am the son of the first fish who climbed ashore but the news has not yet reached my bowels.

The monster in American history is not simply that which destroys. It is a being that must be destroyed. ...There can be no simple border wars in America's conflicts. Every battle is a mythic battle, a struggle against savagery, whether it be a Native American war, the search for a sea monster, or a war on terror.

The corpses in the wasteland of past and present haunt us. We are still in Eliot's land of the dead, imprisoned in Kafka's penal colony, running from the unexplained rage of the golem, listening to Lovecraft's drumbeat of horror, and shivering in the chilly shadow of Grau and Murnau's Nosferatu. We cannot awaken from history.

Robert Boyle, the English scientist largely responsible for the creation of the modern discipline of chemistry, interviewed miners in the 1670s in an attempt to discover whether the men had met with any "subterraneous demons . . . in what shape and manner they appear; what they portend and what they do.

You know, of course, that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

We have long passed the Victorian era, when asterisks were followed after a certain interval by a baby.

You know that the Tasmanians, who never committed adultery, are now extinct.

As you always taught me, men who think have proven to be the most dangerous of all over the course of history," I said. "So have you been a dangerous man?"" I laughed. "I would like to think so.

A terrible beauty is born.