Quotes About History

The Church was the greatest landholder in existence; in the Carolingian period one third of all Gaul belonged to the Church

the Berbers, who had been assigned by the Arabs the less desirable northern regions of Spain, had rebelled soon after the conquest.

the Christian art of secluded Ravenna.

Nothing is left to us of the peace and prosperity of our ancestors except the crimes that have ruined that prosperity.

Knowledge of history frees us to be contemporary.

[T]he historian lays humanity on the couch.

this country is so new to us and so old to the world, and its emptiness should have been a warning rather than an invitation—

Although thoroughly discredited and defanged, the Bund, in the public mind,

When he heard the news, Luftwaffe General Walter Dornberg, the director of the Peenemünde center, exultantly crowed to his staff, "This afternoon, the spaceship was born." But, as Dornberg knew, this first successful test flight of the V-2 rocket—the world's first long-range ballistic missile—had a much more immediate importance

Were the Germans able to perfect these new weapons six months earlier, it was likely that our invasion of Europe would have encountered enormous difficulties and, in certain circumstances, would not have been possible," General Dwight D. Eisenhower, supreme commander of the invasion forces, later wrote. "I am certain that after six months of such activity, an attack on Europe would have been a washout.

Poland lost about 20 percent of its population, compared to 11 percent for the Soviet Union, 7 percent for Germany, and less than 1 percent for both the United States and Britain.

When Marie-Madeleine Fourcade died on July 20, 1989, at the age of seventy-nine, she became the first woman to be given a funeral at Les Invalides, a splendid complex of buildings in Paris that celebrates

On your marks, he had said to the nation, for a race with destiny.… Get set for the greatest effort of our history. Then, while the people waited poised and tense, he tucked the starter's gun back in his pocket and went off to a Hyde Park weekend." The

On your marks, he had said to the nation, for a race with destiny.… Get set for the greatest effort of our history. Then, while the people waited poised and tense, he tucked the starter's gun back in his pocket and went off to a Hyde Park weekend." The British,

What would have happened if Hitler had not declared war on the United States, or if the Japanese had not attacked American soil?

Roosevelt had belittled his closest ally, a man who greatly admired him. In the process, the president sent a very different message than he intended. How could the ever suspicious Stalin be expected to trust these men when they showed no loyalty to each other?

Ed Murrow] admitted he was having trouble coming to grips with the idea of peace: "Trying to realize what has happened, one's mind takes refuge in the past. The war that was seems more real than the peace that has come.

When he took charge of the Air Corps in 1938, it was in pitiful shape—a pale shadow of the mighty Luftwaffe or Britain's Royal Air Force. Arnold himself called his service "practically nonexistent." Ranked twentieth in size among the world's air forces and still under Army control, it had a few hundred combat planes, many of them obsolete, and fewer than nineteen thousand officers and enlisted men.

and one who has not lived through it could never believe what happened.

84 Charing Cross Road.)

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, thousands of desperate Jews lined up each day in front of U.S. consulates in Germany, Austria, and other Nazi-controlled countries to apply for visas. However, with little sentiment in America for providing them with a means of escape, almost all were turned away.

Shortly after Lindbergh's first speech, Sherwood wrote in his diary: "Will Lindbergh one day be our Fuehrer?

After Rep. Martin Sweeney of Ohio delivered a scathing attack on the Roosevelt administration for allegedly using conscription as a way to get the United States into the war, Rep. Beverly Vincent of Kentucky, who was next to Sweeney, loudly muttered that he refused "to sit by a traitor." Sweeney swung at Vincent, who responded with a sharp right to the jaw that sent Sweeney staggering. It was, said the House doorkeeper, the best punch thrown by a member of Congress in fifty years.

In the late 1960s, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade pulled back the veil cloaking her wartime activities in her gripping memoir, Noah's Ark, which was rightly described by MI6's Kenneth Cohen as "a Homeric saga" of her and Alliance's daily life under German occupation. But like Fourcade herself, the memoir is little known today.