Quotes About History

We may agree that genocidal violence cannot be understood as rational; yet, we need to understand it as thinkable.

Atrocity cannot be its own explanation. Violence cannot be allowed to speak for itself, for violence is not its own meaning. To be made thinkable it needs to be historicized.

Later, we'll look up what was recorded in our history about yours in faraway lands. Then we'll ask ourselves, "Was Andalusia here or there? On earth, or only in poems?

There is no tomorrow in This desert except what we saw yesterday

instead of being in history he was in love

History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.

I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world's. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We're not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar

sistema de numeración más antiguo es el quinario, que es el sistema en el que las unidades se agrupan de cinco en cinco.

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.

Islam has existed for 1,400 years, includes one-fifth of the world's population, and has ruled geographical areas that are more extensive than any other world empire.

Three years ago the Government announced the creation of Reconciliation Place, and said that it would include a memorial to those removed from their families. However, they refused to include any of those who were removed in the design of their own memorial.

Most people believed in witches; the thornier question was whether an individual could reasonably be hanged on the testimony of her neighbours.

All around these streets , the dead and forgotten - mostly travellers born three thousand miles away, and four hundred years once dreamed and schemed, full of sound and fury. They were real and vital, as yet undimmed by posterity, and lived and loved with every imaginable kind of human feeling until at last they returned to dust.

Only by taking the strange on its own terms can we understand ourselves in time. This is the purpose of history, which my doctoral supervisor was taught then passed on to me. It remains the name of the game.

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us.

Can't you see there's a determinism about the fate of nations? They all seem to get what they deserve in the long run.

For as we stretch & strain to look through the various windows into the past, we do not merely see a bygone people hunting, fishing, painting their bodies, & dancing their dances. If we look long enough, if we dwell on their joy, fear, & reverence, we may in the end catch glimpses of almost forgotten aspects of our own selves.

All new news is old news happening to new people

I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.

We humans are a frightening animal. Throughout our species existence, we have used each new technology we have developed to boost the destructive power of our ancient predisposition for killing members of our own species.

The evidence of history is that no advance which can be applied to the killing of other human beings goes unused.

killing other members of our own species -a rarity in the animal kingdom- is a male behavior that evolved early in our history, because those individuals who manifested such a predisposition were more likely to transmit their genes to the next generation than those who didn't. War and violence, then, are indelibly linked to sex and reproduction.

Abandoned weapons and corpses may be washed away, removed by animals, dismembered by the victors as trophies, or buried, burned, or otherwise disposed of by the vanquished after defeat. It is reasonable to expect that direct archaeological evidence of warfare will be limited, and that it will actually tend to underestimate the frequency and bloody nature of past conflicts.

For history and biology also show that even if we are a violent species, in which males have an inborn predisposition to engage in team aggression, the specific conditions of our environment, culture, economic well-being, and demographic structure can have dramatic impacts on how our most fundamental impulses are expressed.