Quotes About History

By means of our myths and legends we maintain a sense of what we are worth and who we are. Without them we should undoubtedly go mad.

The past is a script we are constantly rewriting.

Once a certain historical momentum is created I don't think it can be stopped.

There was even a time when people, for instance Roman soldiers, were paid their wages in salt. Hence the word salary, a derivative of salt.

For every culture-hero living out his myth, there must be a witness willing to pass the story on. Then

These fallen heroes represent the character of a nation who has a long history of patriotism and honor - and a nation who has fought many battles to keep our country free from threats of terror.

A recorded past is no more than a bygone present composed of the footprints made by human beings actually going somewhere but not knowing (in any extended sense), and certainly not revealing to us, how, they came to be afoot on these particular journeys.

Neither the truth nor the character of history depend, in any way, upon its having some lesson to teach us. And if ever we persuade ourselves that the past has taught us something, we may be certain that it is not the historical past which has been our teacher.

For history and for science facts are self-evident and are the subject-matter of these studies, but for philosophy they are the most puzzling things imaginable, and when they are really discovered its part is played.

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchical structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

You could travel mile after empty mile seeing nobody, nothing—just the rugged Meseta—and then happen upon an ancient village of a hundred homes, all conjoined and crowded together, enjambed and encircling a church, a castle, each village with its Franco-era frontón, linked, for better or worse, in prayer, in drink, in song. I

A story is time itself, boxed and compressed.

I have the opportunity to be part of swimming history. To take the sport to a new level would be an honor for me. There's no better time to try this than now.

I think sometimes I guess you see records, say you want to get there and use that as motivation. In a way, it's kind of cool if there is a possibility to rewrite history and be up there with the greats of Olympic history.

The first orchestral leader to use a baton was German conductor Louis Spohr, in 1820. Prior to the use of a baton, conductors often tapped a staff on the floor to demonstrate the beat — a practice that led to the death of 17th century French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully, who stabbed himself in the foot with his staff and subsequently died of gangrene.

For at the same time many people seem eager to extend the circle of our moral consideration to animals, in our factory farms and laboratories we are inflicting more suffering on more animals than at any time in history.

Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognize as food.

People who have outrageous skills and abilities are the gold nuggets in the river bed of human history.

Take away the idea of dark times and ruin and you begin to hear other voices. Women were not always silent, or without the power to make choices – we may just have been listening in the wrong places;

silver coins had gone from being a convenient way to carry a valuable metal to a symbol in their own right. Coins were value you could carry about, which other people recognized the same way you did. They didn't need to be sheltered and fed like cattle, or ploughed and reaped like fields, and best of all they didn't die; their value persisted. They could be buried in times of trouble and dug up to spend later.

In England it took two hundred years after the Romans left before coins were used as money again. There were no mints at all east of the Rhine until Regensburg, and that mint produced very little.37

She was called Victoria because she had beaten us in battle seven hundred years before, and she was called Gloriana because she was glorious, and she was called the Queen because the human mouth was not shaped to say her true name.

I do my own habitual scan. I've already completed mental check-offs of the drunks, the painfully pierced, and there have been two iced coffees and a couple sharing a starfruit. Miriam is back in her spot. I go over and ask her, "If you could go back in time and kill Hitler as a baby, would you?

It had obsessed his father and caused his death. It had briefly obsessed Pétur before he had tried to put it behind him. It had obsessed Agnar and the foreign Lord of the Rings fans, and it had obsessed Hákon. No possessed Hákon. Only his grandfather, Högni, had had the