Quotes About History

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.

Their first discussion began with Huang Di inquiring, "I've heard that in the days of old everyone lived one hundred years without showing the usual signs of aging. In our time, however, people age prematurely, living only fifty years. Is this due to a change in the environment, or is it because people have lost the correct way of life?

The writing of autobiography or memoir is comparable to the effect of time on ruins: it works by means of subtraction and selection.

lineage is only the normal marker of passing time.

On the whole, it is less the sequence of ages that holds his attention than the general feeling of a kind of fatality:

the other and the past coexisted there from the beginning),

tell me how you age, and I will tell you what you were.

But history is neither watchmaking nor cabinet construction. It is an endeavor toward better understanding.

The good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.

When it is a question of ascertaining whether or not some human act has really taken place, [historians] cannot be too painstaking. If they proceed to the reasons for that act, they are content with the merest appearance, ordinarily founded upon one of those maxims of common-place psychology which are neither more nor less true than their opposites.

Detrás de los rasgos sensibles del paisaje, de las herramientas o de las máquinas, detrás de los escritos aparentemente más fríos, y de las instituciones aparentemente más distanciadas de los q las han creado, la historia quiere aprender a los hombres

La incomprensión del presente nace fatalmente de la ignorancia del pasado

the shires which Alfred not so long before had been obliged to surrender to the Vikings remained for the most part united till the twelfth century under the common designation of "Danelaw". But the region so named extended well beyond the limits within which the study of place-names reveals intensive Scandinavian settlement.

In a word, a historical phenomenon can never be understood apart from its moment in time. This is true of ever evolutionary stage, our own and all others. As the old Arab proverb has it: 'Men resemble their times more than they do their fathers.

In contrast, historical time is a concrete and living reality with an irreversible onward rush. It is the very plasma in which events are immersed, and the field within which they become intelligible.

Zapewne, gdyby?my nawet uznali, ?e historia do niczego poza tym nie s?u?y, nale?a?oby na jej plus zapisa? to, ?e jest bardzo zajmuj?ca (...).

Les méchants faits détruisent les belles théories.

His history will henceforth be known as I craft it. Is this not the manner in which all history is recorded? It is written, and it is so.

I think journalists have the right to their opinions but I think their opinions should be based on history and what they see, not what they feel, how long they've been waiting or whether it's raining or it's snowing or whatever.

When an old person dies, it's as though a library has burnt to the ground.

When Charlemagne began his long campaign against the Saxons in 772, he destroyed

period in which the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms came into being.

The 'heathen men' who attacked Lindisfarne in the summer of 793 are better known today as the vikings,

But the assault on Lindisfarne was a seismic moment that sent shockwaves right across Europe.