Quotes About History

Because pessimism needs to counter that argument in order to be at all persuasive, a recurring theme in pessimistic theories throughout history has been that an exceptionally dangerous moment is imminent.

If it turns out that all this time we have merely been studying the programming of a cosmic planetarium, then that would merely mean that we have been studying a smaller portion of reality than we thought. So what? Such things have happened many times in the history of science, as our horizons have expanded beyond the Earth to include the solar system, our Galaxy, other galaxies, clusters of galaxies and so on, and, of course, parallel universes.

Before 1945, no human being had ever observed a nuclear-fission (atomic-bomb) explosion; there may never have been one in the history of the universe.

No city exists in the present tense,' wrote James Stephens, Dublin journalist and poet in 1923, 'it is the only surviving mass-statement of our ancestors, and it changes inversely to its inhabitants. It is old when they are young, and when they grow old it has become amazingly and shiningly young again.

And it was telling that it took forty-three years to rebuild the single bridge across the Liffey after it collapsed in 1385, and that it was the abbot of St Mary's Abbey, not the justiciar or the merchants, who eventually oversaw the construction of what was the first fully stone bridge.

The rest of the world should know who really defeated the Germans.

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.

Just twenty-one years after Columbus's first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair.

Elie Wiesel is right: the road to Auschwitz was being paved in the earliest days of Christendom. But another conclusion now is equally evident: on the way to Auschwitz the road's pathway led straight through the heart of the Indies and of North and South America.

The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.

On the very day that Columbus finally set forth on his journey that would shake the world, the port of the city he sailed from was filled with ships that were deporting Jews from Spain. By the time the expulsion was complete between 120,000 and 150,000 Jews had been driven from their homes (their valuables, often meager, having first been confiscated) and then they were cast out to sea.

Given the shortage of women in California during these early years of white settlement, "a likely young girl" might cost almost double that of a boy, because, as the Marysville Appeal phrased it, girls served the double duty "of labor and of lust.

Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples had been exterminated.

Columbus says he decided to send "two men up-country" to see what they could see. "They traveled for three days," he wrote, "and found an infinite number of small villages and people without number, but nothing of importance."35 People without number—but nothing of importance. It would become a motto for the ages.

A final note on numbers: My research shows Ann Eliza was most likely Brigham's 52 of 55 wives. As far as I can tell, she was called the 19th because removed from the total tally were the wives who had died, who were barren, or whom Brigham no longer had sexual relations with.

You say in your letter the historian writes the truth. Forgive me, I must disagree. The historian writes a truth. The memoirist writes a truth. The novelist writes a truth. And so on.

British battleships were driven by between 30 and 100 megawatts of power.

The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

it seems to me that this kind of hero—privileged, self-assured, the perpetual heir to the kingdom, and not averse to violence—has been and continues to be lauded throughout history.

Who can say why some arrive and then depart forgotten while others fashion history?

A total of 56 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame have been associated with the New York Yankees at one time or another as a player, manager, or front office executive - the highest representation of any other team.

1932) That season, the Yankees scored at least one run in every game played, becoming the only team in major league history to avoid being shut out over an entire season.

Deion) Sanders made history as the first athlete to hit a home run in the major leagues and site a touchdown in the same week.