Quotes About History

Keith Thomas' Magic and the Decline of Religion (1971).

Like most people at the time, Hitler believed that women who did not have children would eventually become mentally ill.

As Plato wrote long ago, the only people who will no longer see war are the dead. Which, of course, is precisely why we need to understand it as best we can.

For example, at Wigan Pier, later to be made famous by George Orwell, women formed just 5.5 percent of the work force. Of them, not a single one worked underground.[355]

and the old farm, now almost overwhelmed

Unlike the huge majority of the current generation in the West, the men on both sides at Dien Bien Phu did not live at a time or in places where they enjoyed the luxury of disregarding [that war is what human beings do]; and we, who are lifelong civilians, have not earned the right to sit in judgement over them.

It is one of the central human tragedies that war is not an aberration-it is what human beings do.

Keep the story alive," he said. "Memory cheats death.

Black History Month must be more than just a month of remembrance it should be a tribute to our history and reminder of the work that lies in the months and years ahead.

The only thing different about the Aztecs is that the meat was human meat.

Durante miles de años, los varones han visto a las mujeres no como éstas podían ser, sino exclusivamente como ellos querían que fueran.

In view of the frequent occurrence of modern domestic groups that do not consist of, or contain, an exclusive pair-bonded father and mother, I cannot see why anyone should insist that our ancestors were reared in monogamous nuclear families and that pair-bonding is more natural than other arrangements.

How ironic she thought, to store the past but never tend to it. ~ Mary June

A long past vividly remembered is like a heavy garment that clings to your limbs when you would run.

what enthralled my imagination in the whole subject of natural history was not the orderly array of facts, but the glimpse I caught, through this or that fragment of science, of the grand principles underlying the facts.

Roman culture was marked by a reluctance ever entirely to discard its past practices, tending instead to preserve all kinds of 'fossils' – in religious rituals or politics, or whatever – even when their original significance had been lost.

first recorded example of a man telling a woman to 'shut up';

Among all the things we fancy we have inherited from ancient Rome, from drains to place names, or the offices of the Catholic Church, the calendar is probably the most important and the most often overlooked.

Caesar corrected the error and, for the future, established a year with 365 days, with an extra day inserted at the end of February every four years. This was a far more significant outcome of his visit to Egypt than any dalliance with Cleopatra.

There is little point in asking how 'democratic' the politics of Republican Rome were: Romans fought for, and about, liberty, not democracy.

It is a dangerous myth that we are better historians than our predecessors.

Claudius knew a good deal about Etruscan history. Among his many learned researches he had written a twenty-volume study of the Etruscans, in Greek, as well as compiling an Etruscan dictionary.

When we look, for example, at the Parthenon for the first time, we look at it already knowing that generations of architects chose precisely that style of building for the museums, town-halls, and banks of most of our major cities.

No one has ever framed a better critique of Roman imperial power than the words put into the mouths of rebels against Rome by Roman writers themselves.