Quotes About History

The difference between treason and patriotism is only a matter of dates.

The public were not to be consulted on whether they wished to have their cities and towns torn down and rebuilt in an entirely original and untested style with no connection to what had gone before.

Those who suffer a defeat are often branded by history as lacking in talent, whereas it is frequently circumstances that are unfavourable to them.

A tissue is evidently an enduring thing. It's functional and structural conditions become modified from moment to moment. Time is really the fourth dimension of living organisms. It enters as part into the constitution of a tissue. Cell colonies, or organs, are events which progressively unfold themselves. They must be studied like history.

Never was any such event [the French Revolution], stemming from factors so far back in the past, so inevitable yet so completely unforeseen.

The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.

There are at the present time two great nations in the world…. I allude to the Russians and the Americans…. Their starting-point is different and their courses are not the same; yet each of them seems marked out by the will of Heaven to sway the destinies of half the globe.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

But...even true stories have to be invented sometimes to be remembered.

He was a child, but his mind was already laden like a museum, where old and new specimens, facts and figures, lived together as evidence of his own personal history.

The story of declining school quality across the twentieth century is, for the most part, a fable," says social scientist Richard Rothstein, whose book The Way We Were? cites a series of similar attacks on American education, moving backward one decade at a time.3 Each generation invokes the good old days, during which, we discover, people had been doing exactly the same thing.

It's more common to ignore the epidemic of punitive parenting and focus instead on the occasional example of permissiveness—sometimes even to the point of pronouncing an entire generation spoiled. It's revealing, and even somewhat amusing, that similar alarms probably have been raised about every generation throughout recorded history.

Historians have shown that "parents in the Middle Ages worried about their kids no less than we worry about ours today," and by the nineteenth century there is evidence of bars being placed on windows to protect toddlers from falling out as well as "leading strings so that young children wouldn't wander off during walks.

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around," said the poet Adrienne Rich.

Nostalgia is only amnesia turned around

The majority see the obstacles the few see the objectives history records the successes of the latter, while oblivion is the reward of the former.

A garden that one makes oneself becomes associated with one's personal history and that of one's friends, interwoven with one's tastes, preferences, and character, and constitutes a sort of unwritten, but withal manifest autobiography.

If the Crusades were not politics, we should have to narrow the meaning of the word very considerably.

There have been seasons in the history of the human race, melancholy seasons for the human mind, the "evil days" spoken of by Milton, when men of letters could not, with any self-respect, mix in politics. How much more highly we should think of Seneca if that literary Stoic had not been a minister of Nero.

L'amour était traité comme la gloire et la religion : c'était une illusion ancienne. (P 10)

History is a novel for which the people is the author.

Under President Obama, we have spent more money - he has spent more money than any other president in this history, actually, the combined total from Washington up to George W. Bush. President Obama has racked up more spending, $1 trillion deficits. And it's time that he join us in this effort to get our fiscal house in order.

When you were growing up in the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s, all black people at least in the Washington, D.C., area were required to live among themselves.

My mom was a teacher. In the 1960s and '70s, she taught history at two largely African American public high schools in Washington, D.C. - McKinley Tech and H.D. Woodson. Her example taught me the importance of equality for all Americans.