Quotes About History

Au XVIIIe siècle vécut en France un homme qui compta parmi les personnages les plus géniaux et les plus abominables de cette époque qui pourtant ne manqua pas de génies abominables.

Few worlds tend to have more than one sentient race. At some point in their history, worlds with more than one smart species have the tendency to do dumb things like try to wipe out their competition. I'm told that's why there are no Neanderthals left on Earth and the dragons left for space.

My father and mother were second cousins, though they did not meet till shortly before their marriage.

The past is desirable, more often than not, because it can make no demands.

History is not acceptable until it has been sifted for the truth.

We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free.

Fred didn't swim either. He said Indians didn't swim.

It was exciting just to stand in front of the hallowed ground of Birdland that had been blessed by John Coltrane, or the Five Spot on St. Mark's Place where Billie Holiday used to sing, where Eric Dolphy and Ornette Coleman opened the field of jazz like human can openers.

Having no past we have only present and future. We would all like to believe that we came from nowhere but ourselves, every gesture is our own. But then we find we belong to the history and fate of a long line of beings that also may have wished to be free

The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects.

and men falling like chess pieces carved from the weight of centuries of indiscretions and the slaughter of worshippers and the guns and the guns and the guns and the guns.

You see, there's a saying carved in Old English on a wooden plank on one of the oldest structures built in America. This is Tangier Island. As it goes, so do we. —Have you actually seen it? I asked. —You don't see things like that. You feel them, as in all important things; they arrive, they come into your dreams. For instance, he added slyly, you're dreaming now.

Against those who are indebted to the allegorical utopian model and its offshoots, the Memory Palace proves that alternatives to the tribal consensus exists. Furthermore, this alternative is a leap away, is deeply discontinuous with the allegorists' endless internal struggles for refinement. It promises not quite freedom but the fact that a careful look at history as achievement rather than ruination offers solid evidence that the allegorical utopian has about it no necessity at all.

As historians, our aim is to do our utmost to understand and elucidate past reality. At the same time, in pursuit of this goal, we must use ordering concepts that by definition inevitably introduce an element of distortion. I believe that our task as historians is to choose concepts that combine a maximum of explanatory power with a minimum of distortional effect.

I hope… that we are making China more interesting and less exotic to our Europeanist colleagues. Soon it may no longer suffice for historians of Europe to make mere polite bows in the direction of China; they will have to become more familiar with Chinese history on a serious level in order to carry on their work in European history effectively.

Every single breath you take contains the history of the galaxy.

History is the error we are forever correcting." —Anthony Marra, The Tsar of Love and Techno

Clearly the use of a vaccine in the present does not cause the one who is immunized to share in the immoral intention or action of those who carried out the abortion in the past. Human history is filled with injustice. Acts of wrongdoing in the past regularly rebound to the benefit of descendents who had no hand in the original crimes. It would be a high standard indeed if we were to require all benefits that we receive in the present to be completely free of every immorality in the past.

Four states prohibited the marriage of alcoholics, 17 prohibited the marriage of epileptics, and 41 prohibited the marriage of those deemed feebleminded or insane. By the mid-1930s, America was the world leader in banned marriages. (Marriage restriction laws weren't declared unconstitutional until 1967.)

Jonas Salk tested early preparations of his polio vaccine in retarded children at the Polk State School outside of Pittsburgh. At the time of Salk's experiments, no one in the government, the public, or the media objected to such testing. Everyone did it. Hilary Koprowski, working for the pharmaceutical company Lederle Laboratories, put his experimental live polio vaccine into chocolate milk and fed it to several retarded children in Petaluma, California,

Like Mendelsohn, Stewart believed the decline in pertussis in the United Kingdom had nothing to do with the vaccine; it was simply a matter of improved sanitation.

Before anesthesia, surgeons removed bladder stones, drained ovarian cysts, and amputated legs, but little else; they were rewarded for their speed more than their skill. A surgeon named Robert Liston, in an attempt to best his own speed record for amputating a leg, accidentally cut off one of his patient's testicles and two of his assistant's fingers.

It's true," says Michael. "Dicken's novels came out in monthly installments. People couldn't wait for the next chapter to arrive. Mobs would gather at train stations and shipyards so they could be first in line to get the next part of the book." "Mobs?" I say.... ..."People don't feel that way about books anymore," Elena says sadly. "Some people do," I say.

As Hegel well knew, the ascent of reason has never followed a straight line.