Quotes About History

Never in all history," pronounced one ecclesiastical historian, "had a Pope engaged so delicately in a conspiracy to overthrow a tyrant by force." A wartime US intelligence officer would term the pope's quick consent to act as a conspirational intermediary "one of the most astounding events in the modern history of the Papacy.

Asked what kind of government Germany should work toward, Pius answered, according to Leiber's notes: "Any government without Hitler.

Pheidippides ran twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens with news of the Greek victory.

The place that gave us the marathon also gave us philosophy. That place was the city-state of Athens in the fourth and fifth centuries BCE.

Tell me a story" is as old as humankind. It's a prehistoric request, going back to when people sat around fires in caves. A novelist's first goal, above all, is to tell a story.

When people sat in caves, they told stories. It was for sharing, learning, entertaining. Storytelling is as old as we are. It will never die.

You can't just shove the past aside. It stays with you, whether you want to acknowledge it or not.

So T. S. Eliot's helpful reminder from "Gerontion": "History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors / And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, / Guides us by vanities.")

Genesis 49:25-26 possibly point to an early stage when Israel knew three deities, El, Asherah, and Yahweh. In addition, Baal constituted a fourth deity in Israel's early religious history. This situation changed by the period of the early monarchy. Yahweh and El were identified, and at some point, devotion to the goddess Asherah did not continue as an identifiably separate cult.

Schloen comments: "Tempting as it may be to avoid explicit theorizing, the fact remains that contestable choices are embedded in even the most 'obvious' and innocent-looking of 'common sense' interpretations in archaeology and socio-economic history.

People try nonviolence for a week, and when it 'doesn't work,' they go back to violence, which hasn't worked for centuries.

History resists an ending as surely as nature abhors a vacuum; the narrative of our days is a run-on sentence, every full stop a comma in embryo. But more: like thought, like water, history is fluid, unpredictable, dangerous. It leaps and surges and doubles back, cuts unpredictable channels, surfaces suddenly in places no one would expect.

Nations, empires and movements boom or collapse according to greater forces than the personal traits of their leaders.

Hamilton was born on January 11, 1755 outside of the United States on an island called Nevis, which is a British island in the West Indies. His story, which begins on this island, is one of the great immigrant stories in American history.

Americans and other Westerners who want their families to enjoy the blessings of life in a free society should understand that the life we've led since 1945 in the Western world is very rare in human history. Our children are unlikely to enjoy anything so placid, and may well spend their adult years in an ugly and savage world unless we decide that who and what we are is worth defending.

The past is another country, but the Seventies is another planet.

voluntary poverty had a long history in nearly all world cultures—from Buddha to Jesus to Mohammed to Saint Francis—yet was generally practiced only by monastics, who combine vows of poverty with vows of celibacy.

Credit and debt keep us fixated on the past and the future.

This system, in which paper money is worth only a fraction of its stated value in gold or silver, was employed in the United States into the twentieth century. Then

If you stay too close to someone like Hitler, you are going to burn someday.

For the eight thousand Italian Jews who could not be saved. For the millions taken slave by the Nazi war machine, and the countless who did not make it home. And for Robert Dehlendorf, who heard the tale first, and rescued me.

My first reaction was that the story of Pino Lella's life in the last twenty-three months of the war could not possibly be true. We would have heard it before. But then I learned that Pino—pronounced pea-no—was still alive some six decades later and back in Italy after nearly thirty years in Beverly Hills and Mammoth Lakes, California.

forty-nine thousand Jews in Italy at the time of the Nazi invasion, some forty-one thousand evaded arrest or survived the concentration camps.

But the Nazi occupation of Italy and the Catholic underground railroad, which was formed to save the Italian Jews, have received scant attention.