Quotes About History

No recordarán la historia, ni actuarán en consecuencia, a menos que su solución final los deje hipnotizados.

Which to me means that one must respect not just the story but the way in which it develops; judging the past by the standards of the present sheds little light on understanding, it represents no more than the I-told-you-sos of history.

The Swedes captured 5,000 new uniforms, broke into monasteries, held the monks to ransom, and opened the crypts to steal rings from the corpses. They took even more from the living, including 10,000 books which they sent to quench Queen Christina's thirst for knowledge.

Aachen had possessed heavy guns since 1345 and most cities had significant arsenals by 1400, well ahead of those owned by princes.

On closer examination, we are simply a banal tragedy spread over two generations.

The French cranium measurers ran into serious problems in Greenland.

If you want to know who the real heroes of world history are, just look at the mothers.

If a nation loses its storytellers, it loses its childhood.

42 Washington Square,

Everyone, it seemed to me, ought to know about Lincoln Steffens.

Christians both took over and then deviated from the central tenets of Judaism.

One way of understanding what followed is to recall that Jews were the people who said no. Offered a new form of relationship with God, they said they preferred the one they had, and this rejection set off several hundred years of rivalry and mutual recrimination, as the two groups competed for followers until the fourth century of the common era, when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire and thus seemed to win the battle.

catastrophically bloody and ultimately stalemated Wars of Religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries taught Catholics and Protestants the necessity of coexistence.

In other words, America performed terribly in the face of the crisis of European Jewry, except in comparison to every other country.

Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen Gesellschaft,

my conviction that the Holocaust is no less historically explicable than any other human experience, though the job is not easy.

Norway's collaborationist leader Vidkun Quisling was shot by a firing squad;

Having sliced Odovacar in half in early spring 493, Theoderic ruled his Italian kingdom for the next thirty-three years, until his own death on 30 August 526.

It was not the military prowess of the Germani that kept them outside the Empire, but their poverty.11

History has all too often been guilty of favouring the viewpoint of autocratic rulers in describing their glorious victories, when there is so much else that needs to be said.

One thing Pete had learned over the years as a participant in so many disparate cultures, and as a family historian, is that almost nothing that can be imagined is impossible, and that, in fact, most of those things, in one form or another, have occurred. Scary really.

like We Die Alone, about the Norwegian commando who outskied an entire Nazi division,

inside so as not to offend the ancestors.

In China it's common for people in restaurants to complain about food. The Chinese can be passive about many things, but food is not one of them; I suppose this is one reason they've ended up with a first-rate cuisine and a long history of political disasters.