Quotes About History

Cooking brought huge nutritional benefits," Wrangham writes. "But it also trapped women into a newly subservient role enforced by male-dominated culture … It is not a pretty picture.

Wrangham believes the cooking of food began during the time of Homo erectus, a human ancestor that lived between 1.6 million and 1.9 million years ago.

We have such a long, familiar history with Peter Falk. The minute his mug is on that screen people smile.

History may always become a kind of evasion of the search for truth. It is always possible to hide behind history so as to affirm nothing on one's own account...Ultimately, the skeptical historian no longer searches for anything, and the dogmatic philosopher has nothing but enemies or students but never friends.

The Korean war has always been an unpopular war among the American people.

On March 7, 1936, Hitler's army marched unopposed into the Rhineland, a demilitarized buffer zone between France and Germany. U.S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull did not protest, and FDR went fishing.

Were archaeologists really such a sex-starved lot as all that? Did pigs really sweat?

We wonder if we will be the first generation in American history to leave our children with fewer opportunities and a less prosperous nation than the one we inherited.

By failing seriously to confront the most predicable economic crisis in our nation's history, the President's policies are committing us and our children to a diminished future.

American history is the story of one society among many, distinctive in some ways, yet sharing in the common human condition. It comprises one brief, unfinished chapter in the great volume of world history, the cumulative record of what the philosopher Immanuel Kant called "the crooked timber of humanity."

Contemporary Americans, immersed in the busy rhythms of twenty-first-century life, rarely pause to reflect that they dwell in a land that has been inhabited for millennia. Human settlement on the continent we call North America (after the Florentine cartographer Amerigo Vespucci) began at least 15,000 years ago

By 1800 the U.S. Indian population stood at about 600,000, a pathetic remnant of the estimated 2.2 million on the eve of European colonization.

By 1500, the North American population comprised an estimated seven to ten million people.

The past is a ghost that haunts us. Ghosts must be banished.

Men delude themselves into thinking that the events in which they participate are of particular significance to history, but they rarely are. One empire is the same as another.

He said history was a sum of situations whose significance was never seen until long afterwards because people had been afraid to act them out. They couldn't face up to their responsibility for them. They preferred to think of the situations they found themselves in as part of a general drift of events they had no control over, which meant that they never really understood those situations, and so in a curious way the situations did become part of a general drift of events.

Having a track record to live up to and the history of successes had become a hindrance. It becomes harder to break out of what people expect you to do.

You can't outrun the history train

prostitutes streamed toward Westminster and, especially, the freewheeling adjacent area of Charing Cross.

Ammonians started from Thebes with guides,

Man is the question he asks about himself, before any question has been formulated. It is, therefore, not surprising that the basic questions were formulated very early in the history of mankind.

history has shown that the most terrible crimes against love have been committed in the name of fanatically defended doctrines.

History is the science of things which are not repeated.

We see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all.