Quotes About History

No civilization, no matter how mighty it may appear to itself, is indestructible.

What makes a civilization real to its inhabitants, in the end, is not just the splendid edifices at it centre, nor even the smooth functioning of the institutions they house. At its core, a civilization is the texts that are taught in its schools, learned by its students and recollected in times of tribulation.

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril

The result is one of the greatest paradoxes of modern history: that an economic system designed to offer infinite choice to the individual has ended up homogenizing humanity.

The great thinkers of the eighteenth century were also pioneering tourists

When you are born in one century and find yourself walking around in another there's a certain infirmity to your footing. May we all be so lucky to live long enough to see our time turn to fable.

hardship had been part of history for so long it had become a condition of life. There was no expectation things could, or would, be otherwise. You got on with it, and through faith, family and character accommodated as best you could whatever suffering and misfortune was yours.

Nobody who's lived an anyway decent amount of life remembers everything.

the more the musicians played the more it struck me that Irish music was a language of its own, accommodating expression of ecstasy and rapture and lightness and fun as well as sadness and darkness and loss, and that in its rhythms and repetitions was the trace history of humanity thereabouts, going round and round.

History had turned violent again and Mr MacGhiolla with a special gleam in his eyes had departed for the North. He left my father books with trapped strands of red hair and a faint sulphuric whiff of nationalism trapped within the pages.

We are our stories. We tell them to stay alive or keep alive those who only live now in the telling.

The truth is, like all places in the past, it cannot be found any longer.

It must be remembered that the Iliad and Odyssey were composed as epic tales and not as historical texts. To use Shakespeare's Macbeth as a source for 11th-century Scottish politics would rather miss the point of the play, and the same is true of the Homeric epics.

The first kibbutzim were founded in Palestine in 1910, and, by 2009, there were 267 kibbutzim scattered throughout modern Israel. These groups account for only 2.1 percent of the country's Jewish population but 40 percent of the national economic agricultural output and 7 percent of the industrial output.

psychologist David Premack refers to as the "Russian-novel problem"—that is, when looking at the history of two animals (or humans), it is often hard to know what caused what, since the two may have interacted in so many ways over such a long time, and they may also remember events differently and act according to this subjective experience.

While the way we have come to live in the time of the COVID-19 pandemic might feel alien and unnatural, it is actually neither of those things. Plagues are a feature of the human experience. What happened in 2020 was not new to our species. It was just new to us.

There was the plague of Athens in 430 BCE. The plague of Justinian in 541 CE. The Black Death in 1347. The Spanish flu in 1918. There were gods of plagues in ancient times—not only the Greek god Apollo, but the Vedic god Rudra and the Chinese deity Shi Wenye. Plague is an old, familiar enemy. And so, in 2020, a plague once again appeared.

So it came to the morning of 21 October 1805, a day that would live for ever in the minds of those who were there.

day that lives still, in the annals of the Royal Navy.

Napoleon marched up the aisle with the Iron Crown under his arm and put it on his own head

It was alleged that artefacts from Caesar's army and William the Conqueror's

Villeneuve reached Cadiz on 22 August.

The Spanish were furious with the French.

Calder's flagship was the ninety-gun Prince of Wales.