Quotes About History

The Chinese government wants me to say that for many centuries Tibet has been part of China. Even if I make that statement, many people would just laugh. And my statement will not change past history. History is history.

I think really, China, Chinese, I think they really have a long history of civilization, rich culture.

Some mischievous people always there. Last several thousand years, always there. In future, also.

It is the paradox of history that each generation is converted by the saint who contradicts it most.

Every leader-writer who thunders 'Galileo' at us assumes that we know even less about Galileo than he does.

Someone who doesn't know history, he says, is "in the literal sense half-witted . . . He does not know what half his own words mean, or what half his own actions signify.

The moderns say that they are leaving the past, because it is exhausted; but they lie. They are escaping from the past because it is so strong.

modern world's unthinking slavery to fads and discussed the things it loses rather than gains from technology, the things it has forgotten from history, and its general lack of common sense. "The world is not so anxious to do things worth doing as to do things not worth doing, and do them very well."58

But after having been forgotten, G. K. Chesterton is now enjoying a resurgence in popularity. Why? Well, the obvious reason is that people are reading him again. The rediscovery of Chesterton has less to do with his importance as a figure from history than his significance in the present.

In an age of universal education, nobody knows where anything comes from. The

We are constantly told that we stand at a unique moment in human history and that this is the last chance to make a difference, but every point in human history is unique, and it is always the last chance to make some particular difference.

For the first time in human history we are now able to remove large amounts of carbon that are sequestered deep inside the earth and transfer it to the atmosphere, thus affecting global climate. This is part of what Revelle and Suess meant when they wrote in their landmark 1957 paper that "[h]uman beings are now carrying out a large scale geophysical experiment of a kind that could not have happened in the past nor be reproduced in the future."65

Drift House: Susan's response to Queen Octavia's sarcasm in regards to fading memories..."But we pass our memories on," she insisted. "I mean, from one generation to the next. Parents teach their children. They write things down, tell them stories--

n honderd jaar gelede die Kaap

The aim of God in history is the creation of an all-inclusive community of loving persons, with Himself included in that community as its prime sustainer and most glorious inhabitant.

My mother denied later that they treated me like this. She has a very convenient way of forgetting and rearranging the past to fit whatever view she currently wishes to promote, much like the history changers in George Orwell's 1984. She now knows very little about me, but makes up stories so as to seem closer to me than she truly is. It gains her more attention.

Who would have thought you could see the future by reading a book about the past?

But I think it's more that when you're young, you're invincible, you're immortal - or at least you think you are. The possibilities are limitless, you're inventing the future. Then you get older and suddenly you have a history. It's fixed. You can't change anything. I find that a bit disturbing, to be honest.

Locally, there were other phrases that had come into coin, phrases the administry did not encourage at all. 'If something's worth doing, it's worth doing in triplicate', 'Those who shred history are doomed to repeat it' and 'I file everything, therefore I know nothing' were three of the most popular.

Mankind has proven to be pathologically incapable of learning from its own mistakes. It blithely remembers the witness of history, but it does not apply the knowledge it gains.

I believe the young man's efforts are worthwhile. I see now why the Lord Praetorian initiated the programme, and warranted the return of the remembrancer order. It has value, though I am not sure this is quite how Rogal imagined it. The act of recording history produces a sense of a future. It is, perhaps, the most optimistic thing anyone can do. We will always need to know where we have come from. We will always need to know that we are going somewhere.

What do you think?' he asked. 'Do you think the most incredible thing about it is that it is an original pict, made ten thousand years ago, by the hallowed founder of the Imperial Truth? Or that it is a pict of Horus Lupercal?' 'I think the most incredible thing about it,' I replied, 'is that it is sitting on sale here and not sequestered in a vault on far-off Terra.

Gamora: History repeating itself? Warlock: History doesn't repeat itself, Gamora, but sometimes it rhymes.

The Bible is the product of man, my dear. Not of God. The Bible did not fall magically from the clouds. Man created it as a historical record of tumultuous times, and it has evolved through countless translations, additions, and revisions. History has never had a definitive version of the book.