Quotes About History

Any complex technology is the product of many antecedents. Destroy the infrastructure of a society supporting such technology and, though the knowledge itself might not be lost, the society would lose the basis on which the tech was built. Members of a human civilization bombed back into the Stone Age are hardly going to be able to build computers from flint and wood.

Cormac studied one of the portraits, vaguely identifying it as of some very early premillennial cosmonaut

We will bring Adolf Eichmann to Jerusalem," Harel said, striking the table, "and perhaps the world will be reminded of its responsibilities. It will be recognized that, as a people, we never forgot. Our memory reaches back through recorded history. The memory book lies open, and the hand still writes.

Our memory reaches back through recorded history. The memory book lies open, and the hand still writes.

Within a week of Hahn's discovery, American physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer sketched a crude bomb on his blackboard.

Mary was the first to respond in intimacy to the Father as she received Jesus into her womb. Her yes echoes down through history in our yes to the Father.

It is the great sadness of our species that we have not found a way to eliminate the conflict and to eliminate violence as a device to resolve our conflicts throughout the entire history of the human race.

A great many people experience the movement from one century to the next, but a minuscule number of people experience the movement from one millennium to the next.

Astronomers always work in the past; because light takes time to move from one place to another, they see things as they were, not as they are.

That constitutionally stipulated deadline of January 1, 1808, is, from our perspective, one of the most important dates in American history, signaling as it does the transformation of the United States slavery industry. For this reason, 1808 is also an essential date for understanding the making of African American culture. Kidnapped Africans had been arriving for almost two hundred years, repeatedly re-Africanizing American culture. No longer. The child was separated from the ancestors.

Fannie Moore, interviewed in North Carolina in 1937, recalled that (as transcribed): "De 'breed woman' always bring mo' money den de res', [even the] men. When dey put her on de block dey put all her chillun aroun her to show folks how fas she can hab chillun."12 Mary L. Swearingen of Bastrop, Louisiana, paraphrasing her enslaved grandmother, said, "Whenever a woman was an extraordinary breeder, she was mated by the master to his own accord.

When we speak of "branding" today, we should remember that it was at one time literal: with a hot iron pressed against human flesh.

Following the precedent set by the Europeans, who referred to the coastal regions of Africa by their exports—the Ivory Coast, the Gold Coast, the Slave Coast—some writers have referred to the Chesapeake region as the Tobacco Coast. But it would also be appropriate to call it the American Slave Coast.

According to the detailed US census of 1860, which enumerated slaves and slaveholders in its "Agriculture" supplement, the 347,525 owners of one or more slaves constituted only 4.3 percent of the 8,039,000 "whites" in the fifteen slaveholding states (eleven of which would shortly secede) and 2.86 percent of the population of those states as a whole.

The next five decades would each show a growth of the enslaved population of never less than 24 percent—

Slave-raiding, which was typically conducted by Africans, was notoriously wasteful of life, since only the young were taken and often the rest were killed. If one died for every one taken captive in slave raids—a speculative and possibly conservative number—that would mean the transatlantic slave trade killed or enslaved some twenty-five million Africans.

Maria had died in childbirth-related complications sixteen years before, in 1804, as her mother Martha (or Patty) Wayles Jefferson had died from childbirth before her, and as her grandmother had died after giving birth to her mother.

I like that library books have secret lives. All those hands that have held them. All those eyes that have read them.

This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.

All in all, for someone who was immersed in, fascinated by, and dedicated to flight, I was disappointed by the wrinkle in history that had brought me along one generation late. I had missed all the great times and adventures in flight.

One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind

That's one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind

History is a sequence of random events and unpredictable choices, which is why the future is so difficult to foresee.