Quotes About History

Back in the thirties we were told we must collectivize the nation because the people were so poor. Now we are told we must collectivize the nation because the people are so rich.

A Conservative is a fellow who is standing athwart history yelling 'Stop!

Gettysburg.… You cant understand it. You would have to be born there.

No man can cause more grief than that one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancestors.

The past is never dead, it is not even past.

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

Chaldeans came from an undetermined part of East Arabia.

the history of any family is a history of death and misfortune.

A book is a dead man, a sort of mummy, embowelled and embalmed, but that once had flesh, and motion, and a boundless variety of determinations and actions.

There have been five great kisses since 1642 B.C...(before then couples hooked thumbs.) And the precise rating of kisses is a terribly difficult thing, often leading to great controversy.... Well, this one left them all behind.

We have an instance right at hand. The Negroes, once slaves in the United States, used to be assured care, medicine, and support; but they spent their efforts, and other men took the products. They

Great Tamerlane carried the lives of his ancestors into the field with him, in which he used to read before he gave battle, that he might be stirred up not to stain the blood of his family by cowardice or any unworthy behaviour in fight.

The bloodiest tragedies in the world have been acted on the stage of the church; and the most inhuman massacres and butcheries committed on the harmless sheep of Christ.

It is a striking fact that the history of each science shows continuity back to its first use of measurement, before which it exhibits no ancestry but metaphysics.

And how would he learn his history now? Imagine growing up in a world where only generals and geniuses, empires and companies, had histories, not your own town or grandfather, house or Samantha—none of the things you'd loved.

Here is history seen, endured, and created at the same time….. If you believe only that which you know to be true, you will trouble yourself with very little belief." On Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" in "Fifty Literary Pillars".

God works in history, therefore a contemplative who has no sense of history, no sense of historical responsibility, is not fully a Christian contemplative.

The thousands of black bodies incarcerated on death row are one legacy of lynching. The highest rates of execution in the United States can be correlated with those states where lynching was most prevalent. America's practice of lynching morphs rather than dies.

Very few conflicts in the history of the world have been satisfactorily concluded according to a published timetable, because you lose all flexibility in dealing with your opponents.

Governments that use violence to stop democratic development will not earn themselves respite forever. They will pay an increasingly high price for actions which they can no longer hide from the world with ease, and will find themselves on the wrong side of history.

Doctrine once sown strikes deep its root, and respect for antiquity influences all men.

No man is truly great who is great only in his own lifetime. The test of greatness is the page of history.

The "olden times" are only such in reference to us. The past is rendered strange, mysterious, visionary, awful from this great gap in time that parts us from it, and the long perspective of waning years. Things gone by and almost forgotten, look dim and dull, uncouth and quaint, from our ignorance of them, and the mutability of customs. But in their day—they were fresh, unimpaired, in full vigour, familiar and glossy.