Quotes About History

Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Ah, look at that sunrise!" Tim says at the first stoplight, lifting his arms toward the windshield. "Four billion sunrises, over the dinosaurs, the pharaohs, and now ours today. And no one's ever the same. Isn't it just the most remarkable thing? Each day is fresh and unique, yet each is also a link to every dawn all the way back to the Precambrian.

Open the history of the past at whatsoever page you will and there you shall find coincidence at work bringing about events that the merest chance might have averted. Indeed, coincidence may be defined as the tool used by Fate to shape the destinies of men and nations.

Kediler kendilerine verilen hiçbir emre uymazlar, üstelik de insanlarla olan üç bin y?ll?k tan???kl?klar?na raÄŸmen. Biz insanlar?n öÄŸreneceÄŸi ne de çok ÅŸey var!

La actividad filosófica no es neutral. Desde la República de Platón hasta la íntima relación entre brahmino y ksatriya en las Upanisad la filosofía se encuentra íntimamente ligada con la política. No hace falta esperar a Marx para establecer esta conexión. Toda la historia de la filosofía es una confirmación de ello.

Throughout history, whole societies that seemed stable have imploded when self-righteous narcissists, enflamed by insane ideologies, so threatened the larger population of the sane that soon everyone feared to stand against the violence, whereupon madness accelerated. No one seemed to remember the lessons of history—or cared to learn them.

And though the blood of Abel had once cried out from the Earth, we had come now to a time when so much blood had been spilled over the millennia that the throat of the Earth was clotted and choked, and fresh blood could not raise a voice from it.

Among the nations of Earth in all its history, ours is one of the precious few that has not brought forth its Hitler, its Stalin, its Pol Pot, its Mao Tse-tung, its Vlad the Impaler, the one who is never satisfied to have every knee bend to him but wants also to be the architect of a new world by destroying the existing one.

Of course, one must always remember that although The Sound of Music is the most feel-good movie musical of all time, it is crammed full of Nazis.

People have lost their history, the what and how and why of things. They know so little of the places where they live.

We yearn for tomorrow and the progress it represents. But yesterday was once tomorrow, and where was the progress in it?

tomorrow is a slave to yesterday.

Sudden falls can come to societies that know too little history or that have furnished their minds with easy one-note propaganda in place of the true complexity and terrible beauty of the storied past.

When you're trying to figure out who…you've got to keep in mind the roots of violence.

The past was a trove of hard-won wisdom.

no one here ever took the work of Karl Marx or Friedrich Nietzsche or Sigmund Freud seriously. So there had been no Lenin, no Soviet Union, no communism or fascism; and two hundred million people who, elsewhere, had been killed by those regimes, had not been killed here.

anachronistic

I am the One, the all and the only. I live in the Pendleton as surely as I live everywhere. I am the Pendleton's history and its destiny. The building is my place of conception, my monument, my killing ground.

When a majority of people in any society share the same array of illusions and cling passionately to them, they will encourage one another until illusion becomes delusion, until delusion becomes mass insanity. Whole societies do go mad. History is filled with chilling examples. Joe Smith knew it when he built this house.

Biedermeier

Tempe, where the unfortunately named Hohokam people ruled so long ago that

When a society erases its past, for whatever reason," she said, "it cannot have a future.

The owner, Julius Shimski, knew everything anyone could know about all things old—coins

Tiffany lamps and the Japanese gold-lacquer boxes that dated from the Taish? through the Heisei eras