Quotes About History

Her logic was a combination of half-truths and clichés, her worldview a compound of misconceptions deriving from a history of our nation as written from the perspective of a subway tunnel.

War remains the decisive human failure.

F or a decade after the bursting of the debt bubble in 1837, business conditions were depressed in the United States. The number of banks available for financing speculative adventures declined. Then, after another 10 years, public memory faded again.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.

for the young Louis XV: Philippe II, Duc d'Orléans, was a man who combined a negligible intellect with deeply committed self-indulgence.

The first is the extreme brevity of the financial memory. In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.

The crash in 1929, however, did have one therapeutic effect: it, somewhat exceptionally, lingered in the financial memory. For the next quarter of a century securities markets were generally orderly and dull. Although this mood lasted longer than usual, financial history was not at an end. The commitment to Schumpeter's mania was soon to be reasserted.

For a long time the New York Stock Exchange looked with suspicion on the investment trusts; only in 1929 was fisting permitted.

In the larger history of economics and finance, no year stands out as does 1929. It is, as I have elsewhere observed—like 1066, 1776, 1914, 1945, and now, perhaps, with the collapse of Communism, 1989—richly evocative in the public memory.

Because it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

it seemed clear that wars were not made by generations and their special stupidities, but that wars were made instead by something ignorant in the human heart.

Times change, and wars change. But men don't change, do they?

Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe.

H]istory is arguably the best method of enlarging experience in such a way as to command the widest possible consensus on what the significance of that experience might be

Whatever God thought about it, the old dictator's ghost was not so easily exorcized after all.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose." Kennan saw in them the need to regard Bolshevism, "with all its hullabaloo about revolution," not as a turning point in history, but as only another milepost in Russia's "wasteful, painful progress from an obscure origin to an obscure destiny." Nothing in Brown's dispatches or in Kennan's training, however, anticipated the horrors of Stalinism. If

Precisely because [historians'] detachment from and elevation above the landscape of the past, historians are able to manipulate time and space in ways they never could manage as normal people. They can compress these dimensions, expand them, compare them, measure them, and even transcend them, almost as poets, playwrights, novelists, and film-makers do. Historians have always been, in this sense, abstractionists: the literal representation of reality is not their task.

After crossing the Rubicon—the real one—in 49

1969, doscientos estadounidenses morían semanalmente en Indochina. Cuando Vietnam del Sur se rindió, en 1975, habían muerto por salvar ese país 58. 213 soldados de Estados

existiera y nuestro terapeuta fue Tucídides.

For without some sense of the past the future can be only loneliness: amnesia is a solitary affliction.

abrirnos a la posibilidad de que, al menos en algunos aspectos, fueron más sabios que nosotros».[55]

It's here, I think, that science, history, and art have something in common: they all depend on metaphor, on the recognition of patterns, on the realization that something is like something else.

he started out with relatively little. He was born into the family of a respectable but forgettable Roman senator in 63 B.C.E.