Quotes About History

And yet we had done what so often happened in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

You understand quite completely that the main lesson of history is: humans don't learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to be a bad cover version of the twentieth, but what could we do? People's minds across the world were filling with utopias that could never overlap. It was a recipe for disaster, but, alas, a familiar one. Empathy was waning, as it often had. Peace was made of porcelain, as it always was.

Human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism...inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon)....And through it all there has always been some truly awful food.

History isn't something you need to bring to life. History already is alive. We are history. History isn't politicians or kings and queens. History is everyone. It is everything. It's that coffee. You could explain much of the whole history of capitalism and empire and slavery just by talking about coffee. The amount of blood and misery that has taken place for us to sit here and sip coffee out of paper cups is incredible.

The past is never gone. It just hides.

It looks like she is standing still but actually she is walking. She is breaking out of the chains of the past. Of slavery. Of civil war. And she is heading towards liberty. But she is caught for ever in that moment of stopped time. Look, can you see? Stop looking at the torch and look at her feet. She's moving, but not moving. Heading towards a better future, but not quite there yet.

History is a branch of mathematics. So is literature. Economics is a branch of religion.

You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versaillles in nineteen nineteen sowed the ground for Hitler to take power in nineteen thirty-three, so every present moment is paying for a future one. Just one wrong turn can get you very lost. What you do in the present stays with you. It comes back. You don't get away with anything.

the main lesson of history is humans don't learn from history.

I have been so many different people, played so many different roles in my life. I am not a person. I am a crowd in one body. I was people I hated and people I admired. I was exciting and boring and happy and infinitely sad. I was both on the right and wrong side of history.

That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

The lesson of history is that ignorance and superstition are things that can rise up, inside almost anyone, at any moment. And what starts as a doubt in a mind can swiftly become an act in the world.

The Dark Ages never ended.

You see, when you look at events in history there is a two-way perspective. Forwards and back. But at the time everything is one way.

There are things I have experienced I will never again be able to experience for the first time: love, a kiss, Tchaikovsky, a Tahitian sunset, jazz, a hot dog, a Bloody Mary. That is the nature of things. History was - is - a one-day street. You have to keep walking forwards. But you don't always need to look ahead. Sometimes you can just look around and be happy right where you are.

People believed in witches because it made things easier. People don't just need an enemy, they need an explanation. And it's often useful, in unsettled times, where ignorance is

History is people. Everyone loves history.' Daphne looks at me doubtfully, her face retreating into her neck as her eyebrows rise. 'Are you sure about that?' I offer a small nod. 'It's just making them realise that everything they say and do and see is only what they say and do and see because of what has gone before. Because of Shakespeare. Because of every human who ever lived.

the main lesson of history is: humans don't learn from history.

The past resides inside the present, repeating hiccuping, reminding you of all the stuff that no longer is. It bleeds out from road signs and plaques on park benches and songs and surnames and faves and the covers of books.

in the proud history of geographic discovery. We had found paradise. And then we had set it on fire.

I need to tame the past. That is what history is, the teaching and telling of it. It is a way to control it and order it. To turn it into a pet. But history you have lived is different to history you read in a book or on a screen. And some things in the past can't be tamed.

No one is killed for witchcraft now.' 'Ignorance changes over time. But it is always there, and it remains just as lethal.

He had studied Art History and put his in-depth knowledge of Rubens and Tintoretto to incredible use by becoming head of PR for a brand of protein flapjacks.

Dat is de grootste troost van 439 jaar oud zijn. Je doorgrondt de belangrijkste les van de geschiedenis: dat mensen niet van de geschiedenis leren. De 21ste eeuw kan uitdraaien op een slechte cover van de 20ste eeuw, maar wat kunnen we er aan doen? Over de hele wereld zijn de hoofden van mensen gevuld met utopieën die elkaar nooit overlappen. Een recept voor mislukking, maar eentje dat we al kennen, helaas. Vrede is van porselein gemaakt, zoals altijd.