Quotes About History

The so-called World War II was a primarily Germany-based battle against the Western world, including the American continent.

The takeover of the Amerindians appears to them as the beginning of the Apocalypse.

The truest definition of culture is that it contains all the human activities.

The wisdom of the ancients decays with time.

There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to saving humanity. History always repeats itself.

Those who claim that life begins at forty, they can't recall history, that Alexander became and died as the greatest without reaching this peak age. They also do not know those who die in their childhood.

To claim that the world has known only two world wars is to ignore the history of past generations and civilizations.

Wars make a man more masculine. Hence, it is the oldest game of men that has been played in every generation.

What difference does it make whether it was Isaac or Ishmael who came first? We can leave that to the Arabs and Jews to fight over their inheritance.

Francis Cook, considered in 1869 one of the three richest men in England. Tennie

Poet Walt Whitman, a Civil War hospital volunteer who later interviewed pardon-seeking Confederates, remarked that "in any other country on the globe, the whole batch of Confederate leaders would have had their heads cut off.

Typical was (later governor and U.S. senator) Pitchfork Ben Tillman's cold-blooded massacre in South Carolina of "a troop of black militiamen for no other reason than that they had dared to conduct a celebratory Fourth of July parade through their mostly black town," Thomas writes.

Imagine: they celebrated the Declaration of Independence! But for decades, groups like Tillman's "raped, murdered, lynched, and robbed as a means of intimidating, and instilling pervasive fear in, those whom they despised.… Between 1882 and 1968, there were at least 3,446 reported lynching of blacks in the South.

This was the ideology of the European enlightened despots of the eighteenth century, especially Prussia's Frederick the Great, who ruled through a meritocratic class of efficient, educated, benevolent bureaucrats, who, more than ordinary citizens, could divine the spirit of the times and knew which way the arc of history bent, so they could speed it along in the right direction.

There was a woman whose body was swollen up with child, and she got stuck in the log. After that, no one could get through, and that is why the Kiowas are a small tribe in number.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or notice him it will be a sign that he has forgotten, after all, who his father is.

there is a sense in which literacy actually distorts the archeological record, for while it illuminates the centers of civilization, it makes the darkness surrounding even darker.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.

Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history.

What Jesus did was not a mere example of something else, not a mere manifestation of some larger truth; it was itself the climactic event and fact of cosmic history. From then on everything is different…the End came forward into the present in Jesus the Messiah

In fact, like most things in life that really matter—love, beauty, justice—you can't prove things in history the way you can prove Pythagoras's theorem. But there are lots of things you can be certain of nonetheless.

BIOGRAPHY, AS WE said before, involves thinking into the minds of people who did not think the same way we do. And history often involves trying to think into the minds of various individuals and groups who, though living at the same time, thought in very different ways from one another as well as from ourselves. Trying to keep track of the swirling currents of thought and action in Paul's world is that kind of exercise.