Quotes About History

Behind every legend, strange to say, can be found a kernel of truth, a group of facts around which the legend was built.

For the world did not change, this violence had always existed and would never be eradicated, men would die under the boot and fists and horror of other men until the end of time, and all human history was a history of violence.

I believe profoundly in the importance of museums; I would go as far as to say that you can judge a society by the quality of its museums.

You must not lie about trilobites, nor yet about time.

Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era: who are we johnny-come-latelies to label them as either 'primitive' or 'unsuccessful'? Men have so far survived half a per cent as long. There

The great museums may harbour the conscience for the natural world, not merely provide its catalogue.

There is no final truth in palaeontology. Every new observer brings something of his or her own: a new technique, a new intelligence, even new mistakes. The past mutates. The scientist is on a perpetual journey into a past that can never be fully known, and there is no end to the quest for knowledge.

Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr

Thus with a swipe of flesh on stone we carry our vertebrate pedigree back 525 million years ... A silvery sliver of a thing took us away from trilobites and snail onto our own special path: one which led to land, to Tyrannosaurus Rex, and The New York Times.

History envelops the past in uncertainty, like the mist obscuring the beech trees in the valley below me. The deeper the history, the more the outlines blur, the more inferences about the past are subject to change.

Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era:

And there is an earlier Wilson cycle, too, a billion years old, entrapped alongside the Appalachians: the Grenville, which rises to the surface in Central Park, New York, to remind us that the human and urban is no more than foam on the sea of the past.

There are seductions that should be in the Smithsonian Institute, right next to The Spirit of St. Louis.

Baseball is a game dominated by vital ghosts; it's a fraternity, like no other we have of the active and the no longer so, the living and the dead.

Legal segregation was long gone, but a strong tradition prevailed in both communities that it was best to live separately.

Mariah and I had never thought so much about race and racism in our lives. It was the great underlying obsession of the Mississippi delta. The elephant in every room. Almost every charming, gracious, hospitable, generous white landowner we met came from a family that had profited from an American version of apartheid. Or more accurately a blueprint for the South African version.

If you were from a state that didn't fight for the Confederacy, you were a Yankee.

We resurrected our history in order to sell tickets and make money from it, but it's more powerful than we are. It's like we resurrected a monster and now we can't control it. Sometimes it feels like progress is impossible, because the dead are running the show.

Theophilus Freeman was right over here. He's the one that sold Solomon Northup out of Twelve Years a Slave.

Family separations were probably the most brutal, heartless aspect of American slavery, although many slaveholders claimed that blacks, being less than fully human, weren't particularly bothered by it.

The truths embodied in historical stories are thus not absolute or universal, but relative to the cultural context in which they are made.

The Emancipation Proclamation of January 1, 1863, had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading.

So yes, religion has caused and continues to cause some of the worst violence in history. And yes, it has used God to justify it. So if we mean by God the loving creator of the universe, then either he doesn't exist or religion has got him wrong. Either way, religion should make us wary. That doesn't necessarily mean we should abandon it altogether. We may decide to stick with it but to do so with humility, admitting the evil it has done as well as the good. It's up to us.

The real battle for Christians today is not Armageddon, it is the battle for a sensible approach to that ancient library of books we call the Bible. The Bible was written by human beings, with all the longings, prejudices and illusions that characterise us as a species. It is not an apocalyptic almanac, a mystical code book, an inerrant textbook for living. It is a compendium of a particular people's struggle with meaning; so it should encourage us to do the same in our day.