Quotes About History

I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward.

It is said that to this day that educational establishment still bears the scars of their activities.

The teacher of history's work should be, ideally, not simply a description of past cultures, but a performance of the culture in which we live and are increasingly taking our being.

the story of liberty is a history of the limitation of a government power, not the increase of it.

Mao would hardly be deterred by the universal condemnation of the civilized world. He saw Stalin as his model. In the agrarian reforms, Stalin had killed seven million; Mao himself killed an estimated forty million Chinese in his reforms.49

This editorial appeared in The New York Times on June 14, 1940, to mark Flag Day, a holiday that seems to have fallen into neglect in more recent years. Flag Day commemorates the day in 1777 when the Continental Congress adopted the Stars and Stripes as the official flag of the United States.

Dramatic conquests often lead to startling serendipities: the most momentous Muslim acquisition at Talas was not territory or silk, but a commodity at once prosaic and precious. Among the Chinese prisoners taken at Talas were papermakers, who soon spread their wondrous craft into the Islamic world, and then to Europe, changing forever human culture and the course of history.

I'm amused when financial planners and academics talk about methods that predict a 40-year success rate of, say, 95%. If you think about it, this implies that our political and financial institutions will remain intact for about the next millenium (40 years divided by a failure rate of 5% equals 800 years). Considering the history of human civilization, this is a pretty heroic assumption.

Venice earned its wealth not only from rare Oriental goods, but also from the pilgrim and crusader traffic to and from the Holy Land.

Linguists had long known that Latin script—the everyday alphabet of today's Western world—evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew.6

Although the Muslim commercial web possessed many advanced features, including bills of exchange, sophisticated lending institutions, and futures markets, no Islamic state ever established the bedrock financial institution of the modern world: a national or central bank

market history shows that when there's economic blue sky, future returns are low, and when the economy is on the skids, future returns are high;

The forces that drove Britain and the United States to control the world's shipping lanes in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively, first saw light of day in Greece's need to feed itself with imported wheat and barley.

This combination of papyrus and a vowel-and-consonant alphabet allowed, for the first time in human history, the potential for mass literacy.

The advent of the written word around 3300 BC lifted history's curtain and revealed an already well-established pattern of long-distance trade, not only in luxury and strategic goods, but in bulk staples such as grain and timber as well.

In the early fifth century BC, a roll of papyrus, consisting of about twenty sheets, cost between one and three drachmas—that is, one to three days' wages for a semiskilled worker.

Schmandt-Besserat contends that the first writing system—the familiar Sumerian cuneiform script—evolved in this way directly from the token system.13

Schmandt-Besserat's work caused a stir mainly because it seemed to contradict the "pictographic theory," that writing evolved directly from pictures—a theory that is still taught to schoolchildren. Her "token hypothesis" was so bold and so different from the pictographic theory that it could not help but evoke controversy.14

The older pictographic theory still has some virtues. First proposed by William Warburton, an Anglican cleric who eventually became bishop of Gloucester and who wrote in the 1730s, it was, and probably remains, the most commonly accepted theory about the origins of writing.

its city walls encompassed an area of over two square miles, with much of the city apparently lying outside those walls. This made Uruk the largest city not only of its age but for the next three thousand years.

the most profitable thing we can learn from the history of booms and busts is that at times of great optimism, future returns are lowest; when things look bleakest, future returns are highest. Since risk and return are just different sides of the same coin, it cannot be any other way.

Once we are aware of the connection between political power and access to communication technology, it becomes obvious throughout all of human history. These technologies are not in and of themselves oppressive or liberating. Rather, it is relative access to them that determines political reality.

the stereotypical wealthy, swaggering "ugly Roman" soon became an object of Greek hatred.

Nowhere is historian George Santayana's famous dictum, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," more applicable than in finance. Financial history provides us with invaluable wisdom about the nature of the capital markets and of returns on securities. Intelligent investors ignore this record at their peril. Risk