Quotes About History

As the historian Robert Gildea has noted, "After the war, those who had done least in the resistance often spoke the most, while those who had done the most spoke the least.

Once history holds your hand, it never lets go. But it has an anxious grip and takes you places you couldn't expect.

Faced with the unfamiliar, we the public have been trained to rely on museums, like schools, to serve up art and culture like pieces of pie: little wedges of esthetics, criticism, politics and history.

Birthdays could be such a bummer when you were older than the country you lived in.

Consider, and you will find that almost all the transactions of the time of Vespasian differed little from those of the present day. You there find marrying and giving in marriage, educating children, sickness, death, war, joyous holidays, traffic, agriculture, flatterers, insolent pride, suspicions, laying of plots, longing for the death of others, newsmongers, lovers, misers, men canvassing for consulship?yet all these passed away, and are nowhere.

And so the Red Army, squeezed between two of the most brutal dictators in human history, fought on. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Benedict and Bernard and the other true monastic peacemakers of history have been effective because they have acted from a deep source of peace within themselves, dating a context for peace. This is the contribution a Christian man or woman of peace can make.

Language is not only a means of speech and thought, it is a bridge with the significant function of bringing the wealth of the past to our day and conveying today's heritage and our new compositions to the future.

In fact, poetry has always been like archives that peoples have continually used to serve their feelings, thoughts, national identities and cultures, and it has served as a factor uniting different historical periods. Those who had lost contact with their past for a certain period found and experienced the expression of their own selves in poetry, and the were able to see their history as a whole in it.

Just because the solutions of problems are not visible at any particular time does not mean that those problems will never be alleviated -- or confined to tolerable dimensions. History has a way of changing the very terms in which problems operate and of leaving them, in the end, unsolved, to be sure, yet strangely deflated of their original meaning and importance.

Lisp was John McCarthy's invention.

The Alto was certainly not the first personal computer; that honor has to go to Wes Clark's LINC, if not to Clark's TX-0, or even to Jay Forrester's Whirlwind. But it was the first machine that most of us would recognize as a personal computer.

By 1990 the Arpanet was history.

Babbage's Analytical Engine in the 1830s through ENIAC in the 1940s,

Project Lincoln—or Lincoln Laboratory, as it was renamed in 1952—they sound a lot like veterans of the Manhattan Project, or the Radiation Lab, or even the Apollo moon program of the 1960s.

NE OF THE MOST FAMOUS ARSENICAL POISONING cases on record (which could never be emphatically proven beyond a reasonable doubt) is, of course, that of Napoleon Bonaparte, who was said to have been poisoned to death with arsenic over a period of time by one (or several) of his own men. Regardless

German aggression tended to backfire,

The history you don't want to talk about. The details you wish you could forget. The pain that never goes away, no matter how much time passes. I

The difficulties women faced in gaining the vote, like much of women's history, are often overlooked or forgotten or marginalized. Many younger women do not even know the story of the movement. It behooves us all to make a concerted effort to commemorate the triumphs of women and to tell their stories to the next generation. Victories cannot be taken for granted. There

We are often reminded that those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, and I believe deeply in the truth of that sentiment. Few things are as vital as remembering and passing on history to future generations.

and the onion-shaped minarets of Persepolis in the distance.

Patterns, Mr. Tiffany once said, be they found in events, in nature, even in the stars in the firmament, are proof of history repeating itself. If we see randomness, it is only because we don't yet recognize the pattern.

S)cents connects us to a past we can't always see, that seems lost but can so easily be conjured up and found.

Yet I still remember how our white suffragist sisters barred us from attending their conventions in 1901 and 1903.