Quotes About History

A true history of human events would show that a far larger proportion of our acts as the results of sudden impulses and accident, than of the reason of which we so much boast.

It would be my greatest sadness to see Zionists (Jews) do to Palestinian Arabs much of what Nazis did to Jews.

He who cherishes the values of culture cannot fail to be a pacifist.

We [Jews] have no other means of self-defense than our solidarity

Histrionics know how to get looked at, but they don't have a clue about how to look at themselves. They often know less about their own history and motivation than about those of their favorite television characters. Histrionics' selective memories make their lives into a series of vivid but unconnected events, no more related to one another than the programs broadcast on a given night.

Life has obliged him to remember so much useful knowledge that he has lost not only his history, but his whole original cargo of useless knowledge history, languages, literatures, the higher mathematics, or what you will - are all gone.

Cat lovers take cover. Believe it or not, in the 15th century, there was a 'sport' involving the swinging of cats (by the tail) into the air where they would become moving targets for archers at fetes, fayres and country festivals. Crowded festivals would be described as having no room to 'swing the cat' as revellers would be in danger of being hit by stray arrows.   When

The positive testimony of history is that the State invariably had its origin in conquest and confiscation. No primitive State known to history originated in any other manner.

American society is the only one which has passed directly from barbarism into decadence without once knowing civilisation.

In the United States, influenza death rates were so high that the average life span fell by twelve years, from fifty-one in 1917 to thirty-nine in 1918. If you were a "doughboy"—slang for an American soldier—you had a better chance of dying in bed from flu or flu-related complications than from enemy action.

A Journal of the Plague Year

Abraham Lincoln on October 1, 1858, less than four months after his famous "House Divided" speech.

the "allies" of today would be the bureaucrats of tomorrow ...

The most serious blow suffered by the colonized is being removed from history and from the community. Colonization usurps any free role in either war or peace, every decision contributing to his destiny and that of the world, and all cultural and social responsibility.

The colonialst as the custodian of the values of civilization and history, he accomplishes a mission; he has the immense merit of bringing light to the colonized's ignominious darkness.

You don't mean what you say. You may think you do, but you don't. What has been right and natural, since the days of Eve, will keep on being right and natural to the end of the chapter. What has gone on for six thousand years is not likely to stop short and change itself, in a single quarter century. Nothing in nature has ever done that.

To a dog, all men are gods. That does not mean they are his won particular gods or that he has any interest in most of them. But they are of the race which he and his ancestors have served and guarded and worshipped since the days when the new earth was covered with vapor and he Neanderthal man tamed the first wolf-cub.

The African is my brother-but he is my younger brother by several centuries.

One truth stands firm. All that happens in world history rests on something spiritual. If the spiritual is strong, it creates world history. If it is weak, it suffers world history.

Bauer 's 'Criticism of the Gospel History' is worth a good dozen Lives of Jesus, because his work, as we are only now coming to recognise, after half a century, is the ablest and most complete collection of the difficulties of the Life of Jesus which is anywhere to be found.

Jesus was called to throw himself on the wheel of world history, so that, even though it crushed him, it might start to turn in the opposite direction. Tom Wright, The Lord and His Prayer (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1996), 69.

I do not think that in those early days of September, Hitler was fully aware that he had irrevocably unleashed a world war. He had merely meant to move one step further. To be sure, he was ready to accept the risk associated with that step, just as he had been a year before during the Czech crisis; but he had prepared himself only for the risk, not really for the great war.

I am writing this as a profession of faith: I believe in a divine providence; I also believe in God's wisdom and goodness; I trust in his ways, even though they may seem matters of chance. It is not the mighty of the earth who determine the course of history. They think they are the movers, and they are moved.

Afterward Hitler sat alone with me in the bay window of the dining room, while the twilight fell. For a long time he looked out of the window in silence. Then he said pensively: "There are two possibilities for me: To win through with all my plans, or to fail. If I win, I shall be one of the greatest men in history. If I fail, I shall be condemned, despised, and damned.