Quotes About History

I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.

Few realise that English poetry is rather like the British constitution, surrounded by pompous precedents and reverences.

Surveillance changes history. We know this through examples of corrupt presidents like Nixon.

There is not much of a bureaucratic leap, if history is any guide, between a seemingly benign call for 'continuous situational awareness' and the onset of a covert and illegal campaign of domestic surveillance.

In America, surveillance has always played an outsized role in the relationship between creditors and debtors.

Good history is a question of survival. Without any past, we will deprive ourselves of the defining impression of our being.

So much of Judaism is about suffering, survival, and pathos.

I read a lot of history. The passive Jews in Germany didn't survive. The smart ones got out.

I think the NBA will certainly survive without Michael Jordan.

You have family-owned businesses that have been around for 500 years. You cannot name a corporation that survives intact for even a few decades.

You cannot survive if you do not know the past.

The 'Iliad' covered only two months of the great ten-year war with Troy. At least six other epic poems preceded or continued the events in the 'Iliad', but they survive only as fragments.

I love drawing on lead. Romans used to curse each other with sheets of it. My slave would come slide the sheet under your door with a curse on it. They had amazing writing and drawings on them, and they survive to this day since lead is so stable.

One of the immutable patterns of history is the rise and fall of great powers. Those that survive are the ones that adapt as the world changes.

It is true that as people, we tend to remember only the positive. With time, the grim details fade away, and as a species we survive on this notion. In our desire to gloss over the undeniable macabre parts of our American history, we forget. That amnesia manifests itself, especially when dealing with the plight of black men.

I think if German literature could survive the '40s and Russian literature could survive Sovietism, American literature can survive Google.

What survived as orthodox Christianity did so by suppressing and forcibly eliminating a lot of other material.

No culture that has ever embraced homosexuality has survived.

History shows that nations are more fragile than their citizens think. No nation in history has survived the ravages of time.

We have overcome some terrible blows to our democracy, to the future of our democracy, to the future of our nation. We survived the Civil War and the strife that tore this nation apart.

Jews survived all the defeats, expulsions, persecutions and pogroms, the centuries in which they were regarded as a pariah people, even the Holocaust itself, because they never gave up the faith that one day they would be free to live as Jews without fear.

I play the unsinkable Molly Brown, which is where she got her name from, because she survived.

You don't restore 'The Last Supper' by filling in the missing bits - you preserve. You accept the material that has somehow survived.

There was once a time when art history and film were basically the same medium, but art history is frozen in late-19th-century technology that has survived into the early 21st century.