Quotes About History

Despite rampant Protestant pluralism, it is still possible to identify general beliefs and practices that have marked most Protestants in most places at most times. Historically considered, Protestantism is an all-inclusive term for religious movements descended directly or indirectly from the 16th-century Reformation in which Martin Luther and John Calvin played leading roles.

It was a brave old world.

One would think the governments of these countries would know better, but they are just as asinine as all governments throughout history. Maybe

The future is the history of tomorrow.

At the time I thought the winner in an argument was the person who put forward the most logical support for his position. Of course, this isn't true. Human history, from gardening disputes to genocide, is full of examples of people with the most decent, well-argued stance ending up with their face in the mud in front of a naked display of power.

If you are not open to the unprecedented, you will repeat history. If you are open to the unprecedented, you will change history. The difference is prayer.

The shortest pencil is longer than the longest memory

Strike from mankind the principle of faith and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.

Peace is at hand? Kissinger sounded like Neville Chamberlain returning from his talk with Hitler, saying, "Peace in our time." Did he mean peace at all costs, regardless of their ally's fate?

On the end of WWII in Europe: Few comments matched those of Bennie Smith, Howard K. Smith's wife, who told her husband: "No matter what terrible things happen in the future, we must remember this: we won. We might not have. They might have won. Think of what the world would have been like if they had won. Nothing can ever be as terrible as that.

In what's usually referred to as "the Columbian Exchange" -one of history's great misnomers, given the genocide that followed - Europe took so much of value from the Indigenous people of what became known as North and South America that it was able to rule most of the world until the mid-twentieth century.

Domesticated animals were often too valuable to be eaten. Indeed, the amount of meat consumed per person may well have gone down with the advent of farming as wild animals became scarce, at least near villages. (In fact, it's safe to say that meat consumption has fluctuated greatly throughout history and throughout the world, and that, with very few exceptions, until recently it was mostly eaten occasionally.)

I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake, evil does exist in the world. A nonviolent movement could not have stopped Hitler's armies. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism—it is a recognition of history, the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.

John Updike once said that he was confused by the very concept of "antiwar," which he felt, and I'm paraphrasing him here, was like being "anti-food" or "anti-sex," since war was such an essential element of human experience.

These are all problems in non-equilibrium physics, the physics of complex systems, or, to coin a new term historical physics. If the laws of physics are ultimately simple, why is the world so complex? Why don't eco-systems and economies reveal the same simplicity as Newton's laws? The answer, in a word, is history.

Many contemporary critics of higher education similarly posit a Golden Age; but no one knows when it was supposed to exist.

Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth, and Brown all began as Christian institutions

If you're going to make up stories about miracles and events that you are claiming really happened, you have to wait until all the eyewitnesses are dead and gone.

The heart is a repository of vanished things:

There is indeed power in words. Most of the lasting change that has been forged in the history of this world came not from a wielding of the swift and bloody sword of battle but from the shaping scalpel of ideas, and what are ideas without the words to deliver them?

Human history has no unique pattern of intelligibility.

The resurrection of this once popular work [Ping Jinya's forgotten bestseller of the 1930s, Tides in the Human Sea ] is a reminder that the histories of 'Chinese literature' currently in circulation are far from being histories of what most people actually read.

International ships are left to defend themselves as best they can, constrained by international rules that the pirates care nothing for, as politicians in the West apply liberalist attitudes to peoples whose outlook is profoundly illiberal and mediaeval. If history can be seen as regressing, the issue of piracy in the twenty-first century is surely the finest example.

Jones's faithful old friend and chronicler O. B. Keeler, now fifty-five and still covering the sport for the Atlanta Journal, was on hand to witness his victory and interviewed Byron in the locker room afterward. The unfailingly literate Keeler mentioned that Byron's back nine charge had put him in mind of Lord Byron's poem about Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo. His headline the next day read: "LORD BYRON WINS MASTERS.