Quotes About History

When Charlemagne's driving impulse passed, his Renaissance faded. For 200 years after his death, there is not much to record in Western Europe in the way of creative thought.

Art and architecture were a single unit; only later did they take separate courses. (It is curious that today, with all our wealth, our builders cannot afford the decorative beauty customary in the relatively poor Middle Ages.)

What can a historian say of this almost incredible tale of an illiterate peasant girl who altered the course of history, who daunted kings, who outgeneraled generals, who rose above human capacities to sainthood? Was Joan an agent of divine purpose, or does she illustrate the extraordinary secret powers of the human spirit?

The character of a great Gothic church is to be soaring, open, spiritual, defiant of earth's gravity, reaching to heaven, not because of, but "in spite of the stone," as the art historian Wilhelm Worringer has said.

There was never a greater crime against humanity than the fourth crusade," says Stephen Runciman. It destroyed the treasures of the past and broke down the most advanced culture of Europe. Far from uniting Eastern and Western Christendom, it implanted in the Greeks a hostility toward the West that has never entirely disappeared, and it weakened the Byzantine defenses against the rising power of the Ottoman Turks, to whom they eventually succumbed.

The nobles were fighting men, the descendants of fighting men. They were proud of their vassalage, a word we have tinged with derogation. But today most of us are, have been, or will be employees; no employee has the right to look down on a vassal.

Only in the eleventh century was the staff of parallel horizontal lines invented to indicate pitch. At the same time the notes were named ut, re, mi, fa, so, la, from the opening syllables of the successive lines of a familiar hymn: Ut queant laxis / Resonare fibris. . .

A modern school of historians contends that the so-called Dark Ages were a period of ascent rather than of decline, that with the withering of the pagan classic civilization came the first budding of a new culture that was to develop into our modern civilization.

The earliest compositions for instruments alone date from the thirteenth century. These were performed at courtly functions. We hear of a fourteenth-century concert by an orchestra with thirty-six kinds of instruments.

The first datable stone donjon, or keep, was built in France at Langeais, overlooking the Loire, in 994.

then transferred all Italy to be the property of the pope and removed to his city of Constantinople, leaving the manuscript recording his donation on the embalmed body of Saint Peter. "Alas, Constantine, how much evil didst thou mother!" exclaimed Dante. This is unfair to Constantine; the evil was mothered by some ingenious clerical zealot, who contrived probably the most momentous forgery in history.

Yet it is unassailably true that so long as we lack omniscience and do not know all of the future, all our generalizations are fallible or only probable. And the history of human error shows that a general consensus, or widespread and unquestioned feeling of certainty, does not preclude the possibility that the future may show us to be in error.

There's a rumour Hitler has killed himself.

Man knew how to feed, clothe, and house himself millenniums before mathematics existed.

Even the greatest Greek algebraist, Diophantus, who lived during the latter part of the Alexandrian Greek civilization (around A.D. 250), rejected irrationals as numbers.

predecessor of Isaac Newton at Cambridge University, maintained that irrational numbers have no meaning independent of geometric lengths.

The system of positional notation we use derives from the Hindus; however, the same scheme was used two milleniums earlier by the Babylonians, but to a more limited extent because they did not have a zero.

The number ?, which is the ratio of the circumference of any circle to its diameter, is irrational, though this fact was not proved until 1768. Many other examples could be given.

A nadie —contestó Rossini—. Todos llevamos demasiada historia a nuestras espaldas, y la historia modifica todo lo que hacemos o decimos. El Santo Padre viajó a París para saludar a los jóvenes. Grandiosas manifestaciones

History is alwys written by victors, and the defeated create a new set of myths to explain the past and gild the future

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, they confiscated all books about Ehrlich and burned them in an attempt to expunge his name from German history.

tuberculosis was then responsible for one in seven of all European deaths.

Anybody who is 25 or 30 years old has physical scars from all sorts of things, from tuberculosis to polio. It's the same with the mind.