Quotes About History

The past stays and echoes even as modernity roars ahead.

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 everywhere, for people to believe in witches . . . Who do you think believed in witches?

if you look at the Domesday Book, the average size of an English community at that time was a hundred and fifty people. Except in Kent. Where it was a hundred people. I'm from Kent. We have anti-social DNA.

Such as the Dancing Plague of 1518, where, over the course of a month, 400 people in Strasbourg danced themselves to the point of collapse—and in some cases death—for no understandable reason. No music was even playing.

Humans don't learn from history

But the point is: history is everywhere. It's about making people realise that. It makes you understand a place.

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.

That was the familiar lesson of time. Everything changes and nothing changes. (There is a tree in California, a Great Basin bristlecone pine that was found, after an intensive ring count, to be five thousand and sixty-five years old.)

It's true. You make the wrong decision in the present and it haunts you, just as the Treaty of Versailles 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.

London, now You understand quite completely that the main reason of history is : humans don't learn from history. The twenty-first century could still turn out to 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. -how to stop time- C'est vrai.

Nora had always had the sense that she came from a long line of regrets and crushed hopes that seemed to echo in every generation.

There are things I have experienced that 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-way 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.

A person was like a city.

He was, like so many of the men made large by history, rather mediocre in the flesh, the fine tailoring highlighting rather than hiding his physical shortcomings. […] A man made more for grand dinners than seafaring.

Because if you believe in them as fact, you are saying the thing that every unpopular scientific breakthrough in history has said." "Which is what?" "That humans are not at the center of things.

We weren't there to take over, we were there, in our own minds, to discover . 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.

As well as religion, human history is full of depressing things like colonization, disease, racism, sexism, homophobia, class snobbery, environmental destruction, slavery, totalitarianism, military dictatorships, inventions of things which they had no idea how to handle (the atomic bomb, the Internet, the semicolon), the victimization of clever people, the worshipping of idiotic people, boredom, despair, periodic collapses, and catastrophes within the psychic landscape.

Trade is 10 times as old as farming.

Hi," I said. "I'm the last of the Brontë sisters.

Ex-Confederate? What's that, like an ex-Nazi? The man fought for slavery! You don't get to put an 'ex-' in front of that!

It may not seem funny now, because it's happening to us, but centuries from this moment, people will laugh in wonder.

For what it's worth, there are also more black men in jail right now than there were in slavery at its peak.

Eric Garner was murdered by history. The motive was the secret sin of a divided society, a country frozen in time for more than fifty years, stopped one crucial step short of reconciliation and determined to stay there.

He was a walking cut corner, a thumb on the scale of American history. The