Quotes About History

The senior detective in charge of the biggest manhunt in British criminal history didn't know how to work a tape recorder.

John Comaroff, an anthropologist, has written that history is 'any succession of rupturing events which together bring to recognition our misunderstandings and misrecognition of the present'.

with a particular history, in a particular place and local culture, perhaps informed by a particular mood or thought. This means we also have to mix in human agency, the part played by people's own reactions. Altogether, it's an enigmatic alchemy of often transitory influences and impulses. As a result, there is little observable order.

Yes, they broke the law, but we can't deport them. Let's get over this pointing fingers and do something about that, whether it - they have to pay a fine, learn to speak English, the history, you can do that. And then you have to give visas for the skills we need.

In some senses, the Finns can be considered über-Scandinavians.

Scandinavia, though, really is terra incognita. The Romans didn't bother with it. Charlemagne couldn't care less.

The Swedish royal family's legitimacy is even more tenuous. The current king of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf, is descended neither from noble Viking blood nor even from one of their sixteenth-century warrior kings, but from some random French bloke.

For Jabotinsky, the confrontation between Jews and Arabs was rooted in the fact that both sides shared historical rights to the same land. This was not a struggle between right and wrong, but between right and right.

Anthropology is the only discipline that can access evidence about the entire human experience on this planet.

Full citizenship was, and to a large degree still is, predicated on keeping 'unacceptable' behavior private. This complicated relationship between the public and private is at the heart of LGBT history and life today.

The second decade of the twenty-first century—just 150 years after Karl Heinrich Ulrichs and Karl-Maria Kurtbeny, early LGBT rights theorists, ignited the idea of same-sex freedom in 1868—we find ourselves in a heady, global maelstrom of unimaginable liberation and continued stark oppression.

It is impossible to understand American history—including the position of LGBT people—without acknowledging the overwhelming, debilitating effect that slavery has had on this country

There are reasons to doubt that what we call the laws of physics necessarily apply everywhere in the universe—or that they were applicable to every time in its history.

I can't believe the Three Little Pigs are working for the bad guy." Daphne sighed. "I can't believe anyone still calls them the three little pigs." Mirror tittered. "That trio has been tipping the scales for as long as I can remember.

it was like '65 or '68 again

Even in those historical moments when men look back and see patriotism and sacrifice as the driving forces of history, 'the majority of the people paid no attention to the general course of events but were influenced only by their immediate personal interests.

Royal Air Force.

be a British pilot in the Royal Air Force, press here. To be an American pilot fighting in the Pacific Ocean, press here. To be a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, press here.

Modern perception imagines Washington as a grey-haired old man leading troops into battle, when in fact he pulled his dark red hair (he never wore a wig) pulled back into a queue and powdered it white during the Revolution.

in Baltimore Harbor. While the U-boat haunted Americans

Lucas] was most famous for his short, best-selling book on fossils, "Animals of the Past: An Account of Some of the Creatures of the Ancient World", in which he showed his gift for enlivening the driest science. Apologizing for using Latin scientific names, he wrote: 'The reader may perhaps sympathize with the old lady who said the discovery of all these strange animals did not surprise her so much as the fact that anyone should know their names when they were found.

I saw my wife when she was just born," Frank marveled. "Now that's having history." Now they were dying together. The doctors had them going at almost the exact same time. It stunned him, like the plot of an opera. "It's kind of romantic, in a way.

more men and women were slaughtered in a couple of weeks of the terror of the atheistic French Revolution than in a century of the Inquisition.

Each generation writes off earlier errors as the result of bad thinking, of less able minds--and then confidently embarks on making fresh errors of its own.