Quotes About History

The history of education is a seemingly endless parade of "new ideas" that are actually old ideas renamed.

opening the book, i inhaled. the smell of old books, so sharp, so dry you can taste it.

For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.

Rebuilt in Victorian times, it retained the modesty of its medieval origins. Small and neat, its spire indicated the direction of heaven without trying to pierce a hole in it.

William Henry Cadwalladr

Mr. Lomax had signed for Emmeline. That told me that she had survived the fire, at least. And on the second line, the name I had been hoping for. Vida Winter. And after it, in brackets, the words, formerly known as Adeline March. Proof. Vida Winter was Adeline March. She was telling the truth.

I have written a number of short biographical studies of insignificant personages from literary history. My interest has always been in writing biographies of the also-rans: people who lived in the shadow of fame in their own lifetime and who, since their death, have sunk into profound obscurity.

It was Hester herself, made word.

That name was Adeline March.

He was the first of my ghosts.

wall of yew twice

earl, his mother a black servant girl—had brought

No hay una vieja casa que no tenga sus historias; no existe una vieja casa que no tenga sus fantasmas.

My father always insisted that Persians basically did not have a home, except in their literature, especially their poetry. This country, our country, he would say, has been attacked and invaded numerous times, and each time, when Persians had lost their sense of their own history, culture and language, they found their poets as the true guardians of their true home." - Foreword by Azar Nafisi

I waved back and went in, and began to sort my way through ancient building plans that had been rolled up so long that straightening them out was like six bouts with an octopus.

If you mix a liquid with gunpowder and ignite it, and it burns with a steady blue flame, then the liquid must be at least fifty percent alcohol, and that's PROOF. That's the way they proved a liquid was alcohol in the 17th century when distilled spirits were first taxed, and that's what is meant by proof to this day

The only good thing about the good old days is they're gone.

Eine Beleidigung ist ein Zitat aus der Vergangenheit. Ihre Bedeutung hat sie nur deshalb, weil sie von unzähligen Sprechern wiederholt worden ist.

After the Civil War, Democrats promoted racism as a doctrine of biological inferiority.

The main point of the Klan's orgy of violence was to prevent blacks from voting—voting, that is, for Republicans. Leading Democrats, including at least one president, two Supreme Court justices, and innumerable senators and congressmen, were Klan members.

Bill Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Said, Roberto Mangabeira Unger, and Jeremiah Wright. This is a group I've previously called "Obama's founding fathers.

The bad guys—the Democrats—put up a great fight but the Republicans won in the end. It was Republicans who made possible the Civil Rights laws that finally and belatedly secured equal rights for blacks and other minorities. Democrats are the ones who bitterly resisted the Civil Rights Movement, and had the Democrats been the only party in America at the time, none of these laws, from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the Fair Housing Bill, would have passed.

I show in a subsequent chapter how the Democrats were the party of slavery, and how the slave-owner mentality continues to shape the policies of Democratic leaders today.

One could raise a similar set of objections regarding America's alleged theft of Mexican land. Texas used to be part of Mexico but broke off because of tyrannical laws imposed by a Mexican dictator. Texas then opted to join the United States. The Mexican War arose over a border dispute between Texas and Mexico. Mexico lost the war, and ceded the disputed land in a treaty in which the United States paid money and wrote off Mexican debts.