Quotes About History

Hosiah Lister, now dead, rec'd his freedom.

Someday I'll give it to her. When everything is better. The natural history of her life, sketched out, because nothing means as much until it has vanished.

History is not simply the great tumults and tragedies but the accumulation of tiny moments and gestures.

Even the basic facts of Dmitri Shostakovich's life are often contested, as a glance through the end notes of this book attests. How do we reconstruct the story of someone who lived in a period in which everyone had an excuse to lie, evade, accuse, or keep silent?

By noon on the first day of Operation Barbarossa, the Germans had destroyed more planes than they did in a whole year of their air assault on Britain. The Russian air force had been neutralized almost without firing a shot. The Western Front's air force commander, staggered at the overwhelming futility of the loss, took out his gun and killed himself.

On June 26, a thousand Jews were beaten to death in a garage. The SS arranged for locals to perform the massacre. They thought it might look distasteful if they carried it out themselves.

The Nazis asked carefully about when precisely people stopped helping one another in the streets, about how many people were being arrested for cannibalism.

People want to forget. You can't blame them.

As musicologist Richard Taruskin has said, "What made Shostakovich's music the secret diary of a nation was not only what he put into it, but what it allowed listeners to draw out.

While these terms — Bolshevik, Communist, Marxist, socialist, and Soviet — are sometimes used interchangeably, many people have died to make distinctions among them.

Out of this political turmoil rose a man who called himself Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. That was not his name, but revolutionaries often didn't call themselves by their names.

When history is erased, people's moral values are also erased.

I'm sick of your male chauvinism. No wonder Confucius wasn't welcomed during his travels - jabbering on about male superiority all the time!

Yes. Just think: the literal meaning of the Chinese characters for "revolution" is "elimination of life".

De ontdekking van Rome laat je voelen dat Latijn weliswaar een dode taal heet, maar dat het een levende sleutel is om de talloze deuren naar ons eigen Europese culturele verleden te openen, niet op zoek naar eenheid, maar juist tastend naar de rijke verscheidenheid als de essentie van dat Europa.

Iedereen kent de uitdrukking 'Vedere Napoli e poi muori', oftewel 'Eerst Napels zien en dan sterven'. Met betrekking tot Rome zou ik een daaraan tegenovergesteld motto willen bepleiten, dat recht doet aan de even veelzijdige als vitale krachten die van deze stad uitgaan: 'Eerst Rome zien en dan leven.

Our country has had a hard time learning that lesson with energy.

O mais feroz dos animais domésticos é o relógio de parede. Conheço um que já devorou três gerações da minha família.

Religion has caused more misery to all of mankind in every stage of human history than any other single idea.

Jewelry and pins have been worn throughout history as symbols of power, sending messages. Interestingly enough, it was mostly men who wore the jewelry in various times, and obviously crowns were part of signals that were being sent throughout history by people of rank.

Because of my parents' love of democracy, we came to America after being driven twice from our home in Czechoslovakia - first by Hitler and then by Stalin.

I can't imagine what it is like to be raised in a society where their only statues that exist are to you and your father.

I was a little girl in World War II and I'm used to being freed by Americans.

If you look at U.S. history through religious history, there is very much a motif that shows the importance religion has played in the U.S. We're a very religious country and it affects the way we look at various political issues.