Quotes About History

Seen from a distance, the hill of Montmartre hadn't changed much since Roman times. For centuries, old vines had grown there tended by local nuns in the Middle Ages, though the vineyards nowadays had either been built upon or lapsed into waste ground. But one pleasant change had occurred, a number of wooden windmills had gathered near the summit, their lumbering sails turning in the wind, giving the hill a picturesque appearance.

Del año 1696 recuerdo dos acontecimientos. Hacía unos años que se había trazado una nueva calle paralela a la vieja muralla del norte de la ciudad, que se estaba cayendo a pedazos. A esa nueva calle la llamaron Wall Street, o calle del Muro. Ese año, los anglicanos sentaron los cimientos de una gran iglesia en la esquina de Wall Street y Broadway, a la que pusieron por nombre Trinity Church, o iglesia de la Trinidad.

The "evils of faction" theme recurs throughout our history, from the writings of the "muckrakers" at the turn of the twentieth century to the Democratic presidential primary campaigns of 2008 with talk of Halliburton's contracts in Iraq and the shady practices of sub-prime mortgage lenders.

At the same time, his past lay before him like a corpse waiting to be embalmed.

I'll let you in on a little secret, Garry: everything is history. By the time you notice it, it's already happened. That famous imposter, the present, disappears in the cognitive gap. Mind the gap!

That was the wonderful thing about historical novels, one met so many famous people. It was like reading a very old copy of Hello! magazine.

The past has all the time in the world. It's only the future which is running out.

Sometimes, when he was alone, he sat in the Doge's chair, as it was always called, leaning forward on the edge of the seat, his right hand clasping one of the intricately carved arms, striking a pose he remembered from the Illustrated History of England he had been given at prep school. The picture portrayed Henry V's superb anger when he was sent a present of tennis balls by the insolent King of France.

Once at Golgotha where he would be crucified, the people continued their festival of shame, not knowing that their attempts to heap shame on the Creator God were the most disgraceful acts in human history.

On that day so long ago, in the year nineteen hundred and thirty-seven, in the Massacre River, my mother did fly. Weighted down by my body inside hers, she leaped from Dominican soil into the water, and out again on the Haitian side of the river. She glowed red when she came out, blood clinging to her skin, which at that moment looked as though it were in flames.

Nineteen Thirty-Seven

Another lesson I learned early is that there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market to-day has happened before and will happen again. I've never forgotten that. I suppose I really manage to remember when and how it happened. The fact that I remember that way is my way of capitalizing experience.

It was to be divided into two distinct phases. The first began on 30 November 1947, the day after the adoption of the Partition Resolution, and ended on 14 May 1948 with the termination of the British Mandate.

Posterity is not kind to mathematicians who make errors.

I thought we were losing the habit of wars," Eunice said glumly, stooping to adjust one of the irrigation lines running into her plant beds. "We are, slowly." Chiku took a seat. "But it's still in our blood, like some fucking horrible disease we're still carrying around with us.

The Pelagian heresy having taken deep root among the Christians in those parts, he so vigorously opposed that fatal, growing evil, as entirely to banish that hydra out of the church of the Picts

If the only significant history of human thought were to be written, it would have to be the history of its successive regrets and its impotences.

History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

I sometimes think of what future historians will say of us. A single sentence will suffice for modern man: He fornicated and read the papers.

Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.

To correct a natural indifference I was placed half-way between misery and the sun. Misery kept me from believing that all was well under the sun, and the sun taught me that history wasn't everything.

The entire history of mankind is, in any case, nothing but a prolonged fight to the death for the conquest of universal prestige and absolute power.

History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.

Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history.