Quotes About History

My favourite photos of my mum and dad are those from before I was born. Because they were so into each other and I can see this love in her eyes that says, I trust this guy to fucking bits.

Was. What does was actually mean? The verb to be. Past tense of is. Does it mean that someone is no longer being?

We're not eight kingdoms, but an entire land with one heartbeat. It's why people like you and I need to record our people's stories so we can find those moments when our paths cross, and only then will we know true peace.

Because without our language, we have lost ourselves. Who are we without our words?

These people have history and I crave history. I crave someone knowing me so well that they can tell what I'm thinking. Jonah Griggs takes my hand under the table and links my fingers with his and I know that I would sacrifice almost anything just to keep this state of mind, for the rest of the week at least.

We say to the British government: you have kept those sculptures for almost two centuries. You have cared for them as well as you could, for which we thank you. But now in the name of fairness and morality, please give them back.

The Negro on saxophone blew out a language older than English and the glasses on the tables trembled

My mother, whom I love dearly, has continually revised my life story within the context of a complicated family history that includes more than the usual share of divorce, step-children, dysfunction, and obfuscation. I've spent most of my adult life attempting to deconstruct that history and separate fact from fiction.

If Jenna could get on the committee, she could make sure that it was the best social/dance/whatever in the history of Lakeview. And she could help them avoid the classic mistakes. Like Kenny G.! "This is so cool!" Grace said

Of the 1,019 prisoners sent on the last train from Westerbork to Auschwitz, Otto Frank was one of the forty-five men and eighty-two women who survived.

It was ridiculous that things outside a person's control could make others hate you. The nature of your blood wasn't a choice, but humanity had a long history of killing, imprisoning, or fearing others for their race or religion.

Rachel? my dad prompts. Do I have to...?" His stern expression answers my question Fine. I'm grateful that the Native Americans are finally getting revenge on the white man for destroying their culture, by building megacasinos.

Squanto engineered the survival of the Pilgrim Fathers and it was because of his help that an English-speaking society eventually prevailed there. Their own language had saved them.

What happened to English after the Battle of Ethandune was that it not only endured, it thrived, it grew. Having held steady under fire, it moved forward. The two principal reasons for this were Alfred himself and what seems to me to be the profoundly self-preserving nature of the language which had so slowly and doggedly alchemised into English.

Hindsight is the easy way to mop up the mess which we call history; it is too often the refuge of the tidy-minded, making neat patterns when the dust has settled.

One way to destroy a personality is to cut out memory: one way to destroy a state is to cut out its history. Especially when that history comes out of the native language. Status is gone; continuity is disconnected;

We are, each one of us, all talking advertisements for our history. Accent is the snake and the ladder in the upstairs downstairs of social ambition. Accent is the con man's first resource.

Yet in its life, for eight hundred years, virtue alone, that one word, has illuminated and explained something of what we think we are, it has enriched our description of ourselves, uncovered yet more of the human condition which seems to crave infinite description. It is not just a word but a little history of our thought and actions. Virtue might or might not be its own reward. It was certainly ours.

We shall fight on the beaches," said Churchill in 1940, "we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender." Only "surrender" is not Old English. That, in itself, might be significant.

English was the language of protest and protesting its right to be heard and taken account of before the highest in the land. And the highest of the land used it in 1381, to chop down the revolt of thousands of English speakers.

Queen Elizabeth I has a fair claim to be the best educated monarch ever to sit on the throne of England. Apart from her mastery of rhetoric — demonstrated at Tilbury — she spoke six languages and translated French and Latin texts.

Old English 'æppel' used to mean any kind of fruit.

A great day in the annals of two ancient nations, Egypt and Israel, whose sons met in battle five times, fighting and falling…. It is thanks to our fallen heroes that we could have reached this day.

Phylogeography began in the 1980s as a way to tell the evolutionary history of natural populations of animals and plants. It usually involves looking at a large number of "markers," variable bits in the DNA of a species, for a lot of specimens from different parts of a species' area of distribution. Phylogeographers can then use such rich information on the genetic make-up of a species to trace back its history.