Quotes About History

The past is a closed door.

As all historians know, the past is a great darkness, and filled with echoes. Voices may reach us from it; but what they say to us is imbued with the obscurity of the matrix out of which they come; and, try as we may, we cannot always decipher them precisely in the clearer light of our own day.

The beauty of the past belongs to the past.

that in former ages they had been as wise as they are in this present, nay, wiser; for, said they, many in this age do think their forefathers have been fools, by which they prove themselves to be such.

George Bush isn't Hitler. He could be if he applied himself.

The fact is there are no stories I can tell my friends that will make them feel better. History cannot be erased, although we can soothe ourselves by speculating about it.

He was not condemned to death, freedom awaited him. What was the temptation, the one that worked? Perhaps he wanted to live with a woman whose life he had saved, who had seen down into the earth but had nevertheless followed him back up to life. It was his only chance to be a hero, to one person at least, for if he became the hangman the others would despise him. He was in prison for wounding another man, on one finger of the right hand, with a sword. This too is history.

The character and history of each child may be a new and poetic experience to the parent, if he will let it.

There are no descriptions, it is almost needless to say, of Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, or for that matter, Jefferson Davis playing with kittens.

Only since the collapse of the Soviet Union have we learned that the Soviets were in fact developing a moon rocket, known as the N1, in the sixties. All four launch attempts of the N1 ended in explosions. Saturn was the largest rocket in the world, the most complex and powerful ever to fly, and remains so to this day. The fact that it was developed for a peaceful purpose is an exception to every pattern of history, and this is one of the legacies of Apollo.

The history of American spaceflight is a history of doing less than had been planned, less than had been hoped for.

We can learn from history, but we can also deceive ourselves when we selectively take evidence from the past to justify what we have already made up our minds to do.

The delegates to the peace conference after World War I "tried to impose a rational order on an irrational world.

As the American historian John Lewis Gaddis put it, it is like looking in a rearview mirror: if you only look back, you will land in the ditch, but it helps to know where you have come from and who else is on the road.

The glories of the past compensated for the imperfections of the present.

We should not be impressed when our leaders say firmly, "History teaches us" or "History will show that we were right." They can oversimplify and force inexact comparisons just as much as any of us can. Even the clever and the powerful (and the two are not necessarily the same) go confidently off down the wrong paths. It is useful, too, to be reminded, as a citizen, that those in positions of authority do not always know better.

The failure of the talks between Chamberlain and the German ambassador in London, the public and private outbursts of the Kaiser, the well-reported anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment among the German public, even the silly controversy over whether Chamberlain had insulted the Prussian army, all left their residue of mistrust and resentments in Britain as well as in Germany.

La storia è un millepiedi e ogni piede tira da una parte diversa, e in mezzo c'è il nostro corpo.

I'll never know how many men loved her before me, but I know that each of them, whether he was good to her or wrong, did his part in shaping her, making her what she is.

Non saprò mai quanti uomini l'hanno amata prima di me, ma so che ognuno, accudendola o scalfendola, ha contribuito a plasmarla, a farla così com'è.

He (Friedrich Engel de Jánosis) stated clearly that he was the last Engel de Jánosis, when in fact he knew he was not. He left behind his mother, wife, and daughter, all of them Engel de Jánosis. And then there were the Hungarian Engel de Jánosis, his aunts, uncles, cousins still alive in Pécs and in other towns and villages in Hungary. He knew this. They were not dead, not yet anyway, but in his mind, they were. Already, the historian was rewriting history.

Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

It's people like you who change history. People like me--we just let things happen to us.

Europe will never be like America. Europe is a product of history. America is a product of philosophy.