Quotes About History

It wasn't easy to learn about Gustave LeBon. For being the father of such an enduring theory, almost nothing has been written about him. Only one man has ever tried to piece his life story together—Bob Nye, a professor of European intellectual history at Oregon State University.

the American physician Samuel Cartwright identifying in 1851 a mental disorder, drapetomania, evident only in slaves. The sole symptom was "the desire to run away from slavery" and the cure was to "whip the devil out of them

Trump was praising Operation Wetback — a 1954 endeavor in which Mexicans were rounded up and dumped in the wilderness, where they were stranded without food or possessions and 88 of them died in the heat.) These

Fading photographs on the corridor walls from the 1960s and 1970s showed children strapped to frightening-looking machines, wires dangling from their heads. They smiled at the camera in uncomprehending excitement as if they were at the beach.

In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue and discovered America. Now, some have argued Columbus actually discovered the West Indies, or that Norsemen had discovered America centuries earlier, or that you really can't get credit for discovering a land already populated by indigenous people with a developed civilization. Those people are communists. Columbus discovered America.

No one is better at not beating America than England.

Wolves rarely attack humans, and they do not howl at the moon. (There is no record of a nonrabid wolf killing a human in North America since the arrival of Europeans.)" They are neither innate cowards nor wanton killers.

Wolves and people were not natural enemies. The humans' relationship with other animals established their rivalry with wolves.

French police and the SS worked together on round-ups in Marseille, classified as 'moral cleansing'. In all, some 75,000 Jews would be deported from France in terrible conditions to concentration camps in eastern Europe. Only 3 per cent returned alive.

Our culture is an edifice built of external memories, a way of fending off mortality.

I suspect that art has always had a particularly tenuous purchase on the American imagination because ours is a country to which so few terrible things have ever happened.

Local politicians of color said children and tomorrow. They said digital and democracy and history.

Once a killer, always a killer.

Si rese conto di quanto dovessero essere nere le notti nel centro di una città di duecento anni fa [...] e di come gli edifici potessero trovare riposo, ciechi ed esanimi come le persone addormentate al loro interno.

There was no arguing with blood.

While man experienced time as a progression, from unknown past to unknowable future, to God the entire course of history was eternally present

One hundred years before the present government existed, a powerful leader, Sir William Berkeley, governor of Virginia, stated his views in clear, unflinching terms. I thank God, he said, that there are no free schools nor printing [in this land]. For learning has brought disobedience, and heresy, and sects into the world, and printing hath divulged them...God save us from both!

How do we picture the past? Does it become clearer as it drifts into the distance? Can it be seen from more angles, a better vantage, with finer instruments for optics, and more supporting documentation to draw from? Or has its essence already vanished, leaving space for lies to multiply and thrive, spreading across paperwork that is good for nothing except, perhaps, a nervous acting captain's next snack?

Except science now tells us that luck is there whether you acknowledge it or not. And I'm afraid in your case I see the signs of a history of bad luck. Not even a latency so much as a full-blown case going completely ignored for lack of context.

It's important to know the past, but your survival depends on knowing the present.

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for

Every generation is born innocent, and if that is bad for history, it is nevertheless necessary for life.

If we cannot create peace or justice or compassion within the family we will be unable to do so within the nation or the world. Not until Joseph forgives his brothers and is reconciled with them can the story move on to the larger canvas of history.

It has shown me that everything is illuminated in the light of the past. It is always along the side of us...on the inside, looking out.