Quotes About History

And anyway, it was Friday. Thank God it was Friday, after the worst week in the history of the Trump presidency—losing the Senate, failing in an Electoral College showdown, the Capitol attack, impeachment on the agenda, again. In fact, it was the worst week in the history of any presidency.

There was, curiously, general agreement in the West Wing that Donald Trump, the media president, had one of the most dysfunctional communication operations in modern White House history.

in the larger Trump view, it was during the cold war that time and circumstance gave the United States its greatest global advantage. That was when America was great.

Anyone studying the position would conclude that a stronger chief of staff is better than a weaker one, and a chief of staff with a history in Washington and the federal government is better than an outsider.

The Best and the Brightest. (One of the

The Best and the Brightest

The tale of someone's life begins before they are born.

The theologian and the executioner have been intimates throughout history.

Our search begins in Chichicastenango, Guatemala. 'Chichi' is one of the market towns in the highlands of the Quiche Maya. Chichi itself was a Mayan settlement before the Spanish Conquest; its two

century law code; the predecessor of Southampton was Hamwih;

In the third millennium BCE, modern archaeology has shown that there were indeed thousands of villages and dozens of small 'states' dotted across the river valleys of central China, rectangular walled towns of rammed earth, each with its own ruler. And in that period our narrative begins.

At the time of Christ the world population stood at about 200 million. By AD 1200 the world population had doubled to about 400 million. By the time of the American Revolution, in 1776, the world population had doubled again, to about 800 million. The population doubled again by 1900, to about 1.6 billion. The population doubled again by 1960, to more than 3 billion.1 From the time of Christ the population doubles in

increasingly short periods of time—first 1,200 years, then less than 600 years, then less than 125 years, then 50 years.

Les 5 règles de la propagande de guerre : Cacher l'histoire, cacher les intérêts économiques, diaboliser l'adversaire, blanchir nos gouvernements et leurs protégés, monopoliser l'info, exclure le vrai débat.

How many things we held yesterday as articles of faith which today we tell as fables.

Combien de choses nous servoyent hier d'articles de foy, qui nous sont fables aujourd'huy? How many things served us yesterday for articles of faith, which today are fables for us?

Poutine serait-il féru de philosophie ? Allons donc ! L'homme préfère l'histoire, la littérature, et surtout le sport. Il n'est pas un intellectuel. Il adore raconter sa jeunesse de voyou et d'espion plutôt que d'évoquer ses études à la faculté de droit de Saint-Pétersbourg.

History indulges strange whims in the way it dresses its women.

Peter was struck by the scar's essential nature: it was not a disfigurement, it was a miracle. All the scars ever suffered by anyone in the whole of human history were not suffering but triumph: triumph against decay, triumph against death.

As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end.

All in all, I was harking back to the Ancient Greeks. When you get old, you always hark back to the Ancient Greeks.

No doubt the Romans had felt that theirs was an eternal civilization, right up to the moment their empire fell apart. Were they suicides, too?

In all of human history there may never have been a mind as brilliant as Isaac Newton's—just think what an amazing, unheard-of intellectual effort it took to discover a single law that accounted for the fall of earthly bodies and the movement of the planets! Well, Newton believed in God.

Toynbee's idea that civilizations die not by murder but by suicide.