Quotes About History

Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.

And of the fact that every vision of the past is a vision of the blind

La rue de la Colonie Est parallèle A la rue de la Providence Et chacune d'elles (Si l'une l'est, n'est-ce pas, l'autre l'est aussi) Perpendiculaire A la rue Bobillot "Sergent du génie mort au Tonkin (1860-1885)" Au 76bis se trouve un ESPACE CANIN

En el Valle de México la búsqueda arqueológica ha sido fructífera; prácticamente no se puede abrir una zanja sin encontrar restos del período azteca o de épocas anteriores

Olvidados en las selvas de Chiapas, los templos y las pirámides de Palenque o de Yaxchilán han sobrevivido durante más de mil años a los asaltos de los elementos y de las plantas, en tanto que los de México sucumbieron a la voluntad destructora de los hombres.

Casi nada sabemos [...] del macehualli cuyo trabajo alimentaba a los habitantes de la ciudad [...]. Por ello es necesario mencionarlo [...] tanto más cuanto que después del desastre de 1521, después de la destrucción total de las fuerzas y de las ideas, de las estructuras sociales y de las religiones, sólo él sobrevivió y sobrevive todavía.

Here, in a few words, you've said all you need to say. People stand by each other, but they don't talk. It's remarkable. I've investigated the extraordinary history of these walls. I think I'm the only person who knows that it's the stones, the stones alone that set the tone here.

Mankind has probably done more damage to the Earth in the 20th century than in all of previous human history.

Esto es como el circo Romano, como la inauguración del Anfiteatro Flavio por el emperador Tito. Mas de dos mil años de diferencia y nada ha cambiado.

there is no greater way I can think of to honor those people who've died than to tell their story ...

Burials in Cahokia could be astonishingly elaborate. In one, a man was buried on a bed of twenty thousand beads of shell. Nearby three people were buried at teh same time along with eight hundred arrowheads and a host of other objects. These were probably close relatives, sacrifieced at the death of the great man. Also nearby, more than fifty women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-three were interred, evidently strangled as part of a funeral ceremony.

Allen Westberlinern war gemeinsam, dass sie nur selten den Ostteil der Stadt besuchten. Der Eintritt nach Ostberlin war mit fünfundzwanzig D-Mark einfach zu teuer. Zwar erhielt man im Gegenzug fünfundzwanzig Ostmark, aber es fand sich weit und breit keine Möglichkeit, das Ostgeld auszugeben. An der Grenze wurde man unhöflich behandelt und wenn man bis Mitternacht nicht wieder zurück war, musste man nochmal fünfundzwanzig Mark bezahlen.

Isn't that the last straw; for not only did we have to suffer the unspeakableness of slavery, but the satisfaction to be had from "We made you bastards rich" is taken away, too.

Mariah says, "I have Indian blood in me," and underneath everything I could swear she says it as if she were announcing her possession of a trophy. How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?

That "these people" were ourselves, that this insistence on mistrust of others—that people who looked so very much like each other, who shared a common history of suffering and humiliation and enslavement, should be taught to mistrust each other, even as children, is no longer a mystery to me.

Do you know why people like me are shy about being capitalists? Well, its because we, for as long as we have known you, were capital, like bales of cotton and sacks of sugar, and you were commanding, cruel capitalists, and the memory of this so strong, the experience so recent, that we can't quite bring ourselves to embrace this idea that you think so much of.

I had begun to see the past like this: there is a line; you can draw it yourself, or sometimes it gets drawn for you; either way, there it is, your past, a collection of people you used to be

it was discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1493; Columbus never set foot there but only named it in passing, after a church in Spain.

History is a voice forever sounding across the centuries the laws of right and wrong. Opinions alter, manners change, creeds rise and fall, but the moral law is written on the tablets of eternity.

Few men in our history have ever obtained the Presidency by planning to obtain it.

History is philosophy teaching by example, and also warning; its two eyes are geography and chronology.

A grim pattern is visible in history: When religion is the ruling force in a society, it produces horror. The stronger the supernatural beliefs, the worse the inhumanity. A culture dominated by intense faith invariably is cruel to people who don't share the faith--and sometimes to many who do.

The idea is that diseases like cancer and diabetes started around the same time that we began growing our own foods.

Once upon a time it was now.