Quotes About History

If the French noblesse had been capable of playing cricket with their peasants, their chateaux would never have been burnt.

And it's a crime because the great plays of history, going all the way back to the Greeks, are part of everybody's heritage. It's just like in music, Beethoven or Mozart, that's everybody's heritage.

There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant.

I grew up knowing only war, so for me, it was the way things were. It wasn't pleasant by any means.

Who ever converses among old books will be hard to please among the new.

I like fiction and the kind of history that gives the grace and flavor of fiction to the past. No bloviation on current events, please. I can write that junk myself.

I'm an early 1990's baby, so I had the pleasure of going through a lot of eras in music.

I love to read history books, which is where I get my ideas. I also read historical romance for pleasure.

One of the pleasures of being a Jew, I don't have to tell you, it allows you anti-Semitism.

There are plenty of dead scientists I admire, but I can't think of any living ones. This is probably because it is only in retrospect that one can see who made the important contributions.

I don't think Ireland has ever had a genius for the novel. Of course, there were plenty of Irish novels, but I don't think that was ever the natural means of expression for the Irish.

There were plenty of other hominids, but they disappeared, probably because humans exterminated them, but nobody knows for sure.

The book I'm working on next, which will be my fifth, returns to literary history. I really do love literary history, and I have plenty more ideas on it.

There's plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Roman Britain.

We have plenty of examples from twentieth-century history where, out of fear of liberalism or Communism, religious conservatives made alliances with secular populists and nationalists, and it ended up going pretty badly for everybody.

'Paquita' has a patchy history, beginning in 1846, and a patchy plot.

I don't really write plots. I use history as the engine that drives everything.

I almost write to formula, because there's a historical beginning, then the plots get convoluted.

Pluto has a very interesting history, and there is a lot of work that we need to do to understand this very complicated place.

It is a pity that instead of the Pilgrim Fathers landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock had not landed on the Pilgrim Fathers.

It's still possible to find pockets of old Dublin - but its becoming more and more rarified.

We come from a rich history of amazing sports and athletes here in Canada and there's been a long legacy before us that helped pave the way. And that's why I grew up believing I could go to the Olympics and stand on the podium one day.

The question of sort of music and history, I think, are so important to understanding the poem as an idea but also us as people in the world.

More than 700 years ago, the Song Dynasty artist Zheng Sixiao created perhaps the most beautiful image of orchids ever painted, 'Ink Orchid.' And still famous today is a thousand-year-old poem from the Tang Dynasty called 'Orchid and Orange.'