Quotes About History

When the Japanese occupied Korea in the early 20th century, they brought their passion for baseball with them, and the game swiftly surpassed basketball and soccer as the nation's pre-eminent sport.

Look, we have existed for 4,000 years - 2,000 years in diaspora, in exile. Nobody in the Middle East speaks their original language but Israel. When we started 64 years ago, we were 650,000 people. So, you know, we are maybe swimming a little bit against the stream, but we continue to swim.

For previous generations, swimming the English Channel was the feat to accomplish. And that's been done.

I started swimming when I was four because my brother wanted to join a swim team, and I wanted to do what he did. They said I had to be six, but if I could swim a lap, then I could participate. So I swam a lap, and the rest is history.

I was part of integrating the public swimming pool in the 1960s. A group of us decided one day we were going to go swimming. Nothing happened. No resistance. We just went and jumped in.

What happens to people like myself, who have been involved with computing for a long time, is that you begin to see how many of the 'new' ideas are simply old ones coming back into view on the swing of the pendulum, with new and faster hardware to back it up.

A lot of London's image never was. There never was a Dickensian London, or a Shakespearean London, or a swinging London.

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

I think it's important for History to keep experimenting with their shows. The more documentary-driven, the returning series, are the bottom of the iceberg under the ocean that keeps it moving, and then it's important to take those swings and see if we can ignite a spark with new audiences.

My parents sent me to Switzerland on a Kindertransport.

Let no one refer to the sword of Napoleon I as the instrument of progress and civilization!

I'd really love to check out medieval times. I'm obsessed with that kind of stuff, like on a horseback with a sword.

As a writer, I can't be a heroic sword fighter like General Dumas, but I can rescue someone who's been taken out of history by using my writing to bring them back.

What do I want in a good fantasy book? Court politics and social interactions based around houses and cities. Powerful women and devious men. Drama and action with emotional ramifications. Frocks. Kissing. Swords. An intense impression of history in the world-building.

Shortly after the appointment of Britain's first-ever female police constable with officials powers of arrest, the Home Office declared that women could not be sworn in as police officers because they were not deemed 'proper persons'. It makes you wonder what those Home Office officials would say now to having a female Home Secretary.

I stand by 'Roots' as symbol of the fate of my people.

When the mayor of Sao Paulo wanted to increase bus fare by 21 centavos in 2013, the country erupted in the largest mass protests in its history. It wasn't a dramatic hike - just nine cents - but a perfect symbol of the increasing burdens on the working poor, forced to fend with an inadequate system, insensitive to their plight.

Al-Aksa is a religious and national symbol.

Juneteenth has always been a symbol of freedom deferred.

Roots is not just a saga of my family. It is the symbolic saga of a people.

If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation.

Art is about forgetting all these feelings, good and bad, and trying to understand what acts will last longer, which symbols will remain in history. It's a question of perspective: The further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems.

Driving through Dresden, I still remember the many palaces, happily decorated with cherubs and other symbols of the baroque era. The city made an indelible impression on me.

The existence of symmetry laws is in full accordance with our daily experience. The simplest of these symmetries, the isotropy and homogeneity of space, are concepts that date back to the early history of human thought.