Quotes About History

1913 wasn't a very good year. 1913 gave us the income tax, the 16th amendment and the IRS.

We are always yapping about the 'Good Old Days' and how we look back and enjoy it, but I tell you there is a lot of hooey to it. There is a whole lot of all our past lives that wasn't so hot.

If America puts the enmity aside, if it initiates good will, and if it compensates for the past, the future situation between the United States and Iran will change.

The French and the British are such good enemies that they can't resist being friends.

It's a very good historical book about history.

Greece is a good place for rebirths.

There won't be any more white folks around who think the 1950s were the good old days, because there won't be any more white folks around who actually remember them.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

Why has the South produced so many good writers? Because we got beat.

Just to be remembered is good enough for me. Lots of people are forgotten.

History is full of really good stories. That's the main reason I got into this racket: I want to make the argument that history is interesting.

It is a very good exercise, at least from a historian's point of view, to imagine oneself a devout pagan while reading various Christian writings.

I cannot think of a thing that was better in those good old days.

The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story.

A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious.

What happens when good people are put into an evil place? Do they triumph or does the situation dominate their past history and morality?

That is a very good question. I don't know the answer. But can you tell me the name of a classical Greek shoemaker?

Good writing is almost the concomitant of good history. Literature and history were joined long since by the powers which shaped the human brain; we cannot put them asunder.

'Good wine needs no bush', and if there were need to urge the reading of history it would be proof that history is too dull and unattractive to be read.

In the trial of Saddam Hussein on Tuesday, witnesses emotionally testified about the abuse the former dictator inflicted on them. Afterward, a tearful Saddam said, 'Ah, good times.'

I always think clothing is like a scrapbook: you remember all the good memories and the past times.

Do you remember the good ol' days when Congress was only unsafe if you were an intern.

I don't think we have very good records about what they were thinking except, as I pointed out earlier today, that they did invent our political system.

In the exhibition at Galerie Perrotin, they have the Sarajevo painting - I think it's very good to nail down this story of Pol Pot and other people, not all dictators but most of them.