Quotes About History

History,' it has been said, 'does not repeat itself. The historians repeat one another.

Here was an American president adopting the language used by Adolf Hitler (the Nazis referred to the Lügenpresse, or "lying press") and Josef Stalin, who called the press "vrag naroda" (enemy of the people).

Not until 1961 did Vice-President Lyndon Johnson deliver his memorable apologia for Diem: 'Shit, man, he's the only boy we got out there.

To this day, mass graves of Stalin's victims continue to be uncovered in eastern Poland. As

Yet since 1917 the Soviet Union had created an edifice of self-deceit unrivalled in human history.

Never in history have lies been such vital instruments of diplomacy and policy.

German test pilot Ernst Canter noted in his logbook that while in 1910 he flew at a height of eighty feet, two years later he was ascending to almost 5,000.

Polish women and children were used as human shields for the advance of German troops.

What the Red Army did in Germany was the darkest stain on its record in the war.

If Franco had joined the war, the inevitable fall of Gibraltar would have doomed Malta. It would have been much harder—perhaps impossible—for the British to hold the Middle East.

Between 20 and 23 August, 40,000 French soldiers died. By 29 August, total French casualties since the war began reached 260,000, including 75,000 dead.

Soviet conduct could be deemed less barbaric than that of the Nazis only because it embraced no single enormity to match the Holocaust.

But the collective contribution of U.S. and British cryptanalysts to the war effort was greater than that of any other such small body of men in history. Their operations provided the supreme example of the Western Allies' imaginative integration into the war effort of their cleverest civilian intellects.

Bliss in that age was it to be alive.' (He says) 'Why do people regard a period like this as years lost out of our lives when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?

Nella Last groped movingly towards an expression of her compatriots' hopes when she wrote that summer of 1940: "Sometimes I get caught up in a kind of puzzled wonder at things and think of all the work and effort and unlimited money that is used today to 'destroy' and not so long ago there was no money or work and it seems so wrong somehow Ã¢â'¬Â¦ [that] money and effort could always be found to pull down and destroy rather than build up.

He adopted it. The child became one of just 949 known survivors of the greatest maritime disaster in history, its 7,000 dead far outstripping those of the Titanic, Lusitania, Laconia. Yet, amid global tragedy on the scale of 1945, the horrors of the Wilhelm Gustloff remain known only to some Germans and a few historians.

Both Britain's most distinguished earlier war leaders, Pitt the Elder and Younger, were responsible for graver strategic follies than himself.

In the Second World War, twenty-two generals were executed by Hitler. Another 963 died or were posted missing on active service. An astonishing 110 killed themselves.

In reality, there were as many disgruntled reservists and brassed-off regulars on Gloucester Hill as in any other unit of 29 Brigade. It was this that made their fate and their performance the more moving: they were a typical, perhaps a little above average county battalion, who showed for the thousandth time in the history of the British Army what ordinary men, decently led, can achieve in a situation which demands, above all, a willingness for sacrifice.

Winston Churchill, the towering personality of the forces of light.

David Rees' Korea: The Limited War

It is the duty and privilege of historians to deploy relativism in a fashion that cannot be expected of contemporary participants.

It is known that 610,000 ethnic Germans were killed in Rumania, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia.

On 4 January 1875 he filed his first Times despatch, with the dateline: 'Under the Old Tree of Aryah, Tropical Africa'.