Quotes About History

If history, as by most definitions, begins with writing, then the birth, rise and fall of ancient Mesopotamia occupies a full half of all history.

Highly organized complex societies are delicate machines. It does not take much to bring them to ruin. 'For want of a nail…the kingdom was lost', as the old rhyme has it. Civilizations based on ideology are even more fragile than most. As we know from twentieth-century history, once people stop believing in the system, the end is near; no amount of coercion can keep it going indefinitely.

History may not repeat itself but, as Mark Twain said, it does rhyme.

If the first requirement of a civilisation is the possession of its own language, the second must be the pursuit of a literary tradition. Books are, in historian Barbara Tuchman's words, the carriers of civilisation.

Without Nebuchadnezzar's conquest and deportation, Judaism as we know it, and therefore Christianity and Islam in their turn, could never have come to be.

This change in religious belief would have dramatic consequences for the world's history, the first stage in a revolution that has made our world of today what it is. It oversaw the move from faith in gods of immanence, spiritual representations of the forces of nature, deities who inhabit the world and wear the natural phenomena they represent like a suit of clothes, to gods of transcendence, deities outside, beyond and above nature rather than part of it.

And that through all the ups and downs, nothing really worthwhile is ever permanently lost, even though its creators may be long forgotten. When, perhaps sooner, perhaps later, our civilization finally lies dying in the gutter, some of us will still be looking, as the ancient Mesopotamians taught us to do, at the stars.

Some people want the past repeated and have an interest in making sure we don't remember it.

Since thou and those who died with thee for rightHave died, the Present teaches, but in vain!

By the fifteenth century, Turkish law enabled a woman to divorce her husband if he failed to provide her with coffee.

It's pretty simple. When people got out of Africa and Asia and reached other parts of the world, all hell broke loose.

El propio Kondratiev se mostró siempre exquisitamente cauto en cuanto a las implicaciones de su teoría. Jamás afirmó que sirviera para predecir acontecimientos, aunque, desde luego, predijo la Gran Depresión de la década de 1930 diez años antes de que esta se produjera.

Nostalgia for a simplified and deeply nativist version of history, a past that had never existed except in the mythologies of people, mostly male, mostly white, mostly straight, who found the modern world too complicated.

I don't come from the past, I come from now, here in the cauldron of plague. When the doors to the camps were finally beaten down, the Jews of Europe no longer came from Poland and Holland and France. They came from Auschwitz and Buchenwald. But I will never understand how the straights could have let us die like this - year after year after year, collaborating by indifference - except by sifting through the evidence of my queer journey.

History, in the end, is only another kind of story, and stories are different from the truth. The truth is messy and chaotic and all over the place. Often it just doesn't make sense. Stories make things make sense, but the way they do that is to leave out anything that doesn't fit. And often that is quite a lot.

What a tribute this is to art; what a misfortune this is for history. (In reference to Shakespeare's 'Richard III')

I believe that nothing that once was can be completely undone. Even if destroyed in the material world and forgotten by men, it remains and will remain alive in the memory of an infinite being for which the past as well as the future is always present, and that is thus the greatest, the only true historian, and the keeper of the eternal tradition of which even our best human traditions ...are but shadows and images.

For some people [blues music] is infinitely glamorous, for others it is a symbol of the oppression of a racial minority.

The United States drove itself to civil war because the society valued profits over Black humanity,

Douglass had to dismantle what Americans have always treasured most: their innocence, and the sense that their history was so exceptional that they had managed to avoid the problems other nations faced.

Quien no conoce su historia está condenado a repetir sus errores.

el olvido no es lo mismo que la reconciliación y la memoria no es lo mismo que la venganza».

España no experimentó una clásica revolución burguesa en la que se rompieran las estructuras del Antiguo Régimen. El poder de la monarquía, de la nobleza terrateniente y de la Iglesia seguían más o menos intactos bien entrado el siglo XX.

What one is muddled about may well be the consequence of one's specific relation to society, politics, and history.