Quotes About History

Thermopylae – The Battle that Changed the World

We are our planet's autobiographers- so lets tell as many stories as is possible.

who will tend the farm museums who will dust the day belongings?

The first transatlantic cable was not laid until 1956, and it could transmit only 36 calls at any one time. As late as 1966, only 138 simultaneous calls could take place between Europe and all of North America,

That's because I believe in what I call consequential epidemiology. That is, by attempting to change what could happen if we don't act, we can positively alter the course of history, rather than merely record and explain it retrospectively.

We're still in the Dark Ages. The scared and the superstitious savage still lurks behind the mask of civilization and he will remain there for untold generations to come.

And did you know that Valentine's Day originally started when this emperor like a million years ago made marriage illegal because he thought it made soldiers weak? This priest—Valentine—married people in secret anyway, and he ended up having his head cut off because of it. So the first Valentine was some guy's head. There's some history for you. It's sort of perfect, when you think about it. Isn't falling in love a lot like losing your head?

To be fair he is Lord Byron," Jane said. "I don't know many people who haven't slept with him at one time or another." -- Jane Fairfax

But those musics do not address the larger kind of architecture in time that classical music does, whatever each one of us knows that classical music must mean.

A hundred years ago behavior was explained by one shelf of books, now it's explained by a different shelf of books, and in a hundred years they'll explain it differently again.

Powerful Leaders are intentional about not repeating history by always being open to the unprecedented; what's in your future?

We live individual lives with the consciousness of death and awareness of the past. But the most important part of that sentence is the individual part. Let yourself be humbled by the experiences people have been having for thousands of years. And speak of it.

George W. Bush, on the dais, supplied what seemed likely to become the historic footnote to the Trump address: "That's some weird shit.

Public life...lacks coherence and drama. (History, by contrast, attains coherence and drama only in hindsight.)

China's everything. Nothing else matters. We don't get China right, we don't get anything right. This whole thing is very simple. China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You're going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

The campaign staff, now suddenly in a position to snag West Wing jobs—career- and history-making jobs—had to see this odd, difficult, even ridiculous, and, on the face of it, ill-equipped person in a new light.

Communication of this message required a coordinated effort. Each person's willingness to talk to Woodward was cross-checked against the willingness of several others to talk to him. This was part of Woodward's standard method of establishing a critical mass of inside sources: he created a kind of in-group, and this also suggested that if you failed to participate, you would not only lose your opportunity to be part of the in-group but lose your place in history

China is where Nazi Germany was in 1929 to 1930. The Chinese, like the Germans, are the most rational people in the world, until they're not. And they're gonna flip like Germany in the thirties. You're going to have a hypernationalist state, and once that happens you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

I now understand what it is like to be in the court of the Tudors," reflected Bannon.

New York, the world's largest Jewish city.

David Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest.

But now, the new president-elect—after the most astonishing upset in American history—was on tenterhooks waiting for Murdoch.

he could yet make a case for a straight line from Nixon to Trump.

Nixon, Trump announced, was the greatest president.