Quotes About History

I think the reaction to a World War II situation would be the same today as it was in 1942. Initially, people would question, but once patriotism got stirred up, the whole thing would gather momentum and we'd all pull together.

It is foolish to pretend that the legacies of colonialism can be consistently erased without a trace.

Victims becoming torturers is such a classic historical pattern that we could formulate, regarding any revolution whatever, this iron law : combat oppression; beware of the oppressed.

Europe got over the loss of its colonies much more quickly than the colonies got over their loss of Europe.

Taking over from Arabs and Africans, it instituted the transatlantic slave trade, but it also engendered abolitionism and put an end to slavery before other nations did.

Homogénéité culturelle, historique, tel est le destin de l'homme.

Nous sommes la première civilisation qui dispose d'un passé devenu immense. En 1940 personne ne connaissait les grottes de Lascaux et de Chauvet. En juillet dernier des chercheurs ont découvert un crâne vieux de sept cents millions d'années. La profondeur du temps a remplacé les dieux.

Rhynia, haute de cinquante centimètres, doit son nom au lieu de sa découverte dans le comté de Rhynie, en Écosse, où elle fut engloutie lors d'une éruption volcanique. Il y a des Pompéi de fleurs.

Sometimes, in the trenches, you get the sense of something, ancient. One trench we held, it had skulls in the side, embedded, like mushrooms. It was actually easier to believe they were men from Marlborough's army, than to think they'd been alive a year ago. It was as if all the other wars had distilled themselves into this war, and that made it something you almost can't challenge. It's like a very deep voice, saying; 'Run along, little man, be glad you've survived

The defeated go down in history and disappear, and their stories die with them.

Well you're a real tough cookie with a long history Of breaking little hearts like the one in me Before I put another notch in my lipstick case You better make sure you put me in my place

You don't want to trash what you've done; that's your history.

Every technology has its original sin.

He was tough as an antique ivory figurine, which has withstood the viscissitudes of centuries and can accept more.

Jim Dunnigan, as we will see, calls them paper time machines.)

History is clear that, in most endeavors, success is a product of uncompromising attention to purpose.

Someone once told me that archaeologists are anthropologists who don't like live people. They dig up dead ones because dead ones can't talk back. That's not quite true. But I think live people are too fast for most archaeologists. We're a slow-moving lot.

There are times in history where a particular doctrine becomes a symbol of a greater problem.

I'm a person that just likes to speak the truth, and I don't understand why in America it's such a big deal that we won't read the Koran and we won't look at history.

Not only was he one of history's greatest leaders, Abraham Lincoln was one of history's most devoted readers. Doris Kearns Goodwin writes of Lincoln, "Books became his academy, his college. The printed word united his mind with the great minds of generations past.

Art is a vehicle that allows us to transcend linear time, to travel backward and forward into personal and transpersonal history, into possibilities that weren't realized and those that might be.

History will have its say one day. Not the history they teach in Brussels, Paris, Washington or the United Nations but the history taught in the country set free from colonialism and its puppet rulers. Africa will write her own history and it will be a history of glory and dignity.

But you must stop playing among his ghosts -- it's stupid and dangerous and completely pointless. He's trying to lay them to rest here, not stir them up, and you seem eager to drag out all the sad old bones of his history and make them dance again. It's not nice, and it's not fair.

Because the hardtack was packaged in boxes marked "B. C." (probably for "brigade commissary"), the men took to saying that the crackers were so hard that they must have been baked "before Christ.