Quotes About History

Alan Moorehead in The Fatal Impact (1966).

Don't worry what people think now. Don't ever work for popularity. Above all, don't care what the newspapers say. What is important is that your decisions should be clear and stand up to history." Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine

Famine was the mark of a maturing agricultural society, the very badge of civilization.

We are beginning to understand that by the time the conquistadors struck the Andes or Custer reached the Black Hills of South Dakota, only shadow populations of natives remained. The Indian wars got the headlines, but they were mopping-up operations. The shock troops were diseases, especially smallpox, aided by weeds and a few other members of catastrophic agriculture's evolved coalition.

And, before science had caught up with the legend, the legend had swallowed science and everything.

he'd thought the past was dead. How long did it take for a past to die? She

To the human eye, stars move very slowly. Considering their relative motion, at this moment she and I might be looking up at virtually the same sight. She in 1896, me in 1971.

Maurice Nicoll says all history is a living today. We are not enjoying one spark of life in a huge, dead waste. We are, instead, existing at one point "in a vast process of the living who still think and feel but are invisible to us.

There was a time, and we can easily see it in the five or six centuries that run roughly from the time of Socrates to the time of Epictetus, when the idea of education was very simple, and the supposed consequences of education, tremendous. With us, it is the other way around.

As I pen these words to leave a lasting record, I wonder myself where it all began.

Grandma's lie were more interesting, even historical.

But just for a moment they were caught in the grip of this place. They felt the weight of its history, and mystery. So did I. The paper was loose and peeling on the walls. I wondered how many layers you'd have to scrape away until you came to the time when these old people were young. If they ever were. I wondered how quiet you'd have to be to hear the voices of those times.

Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

To solve the future, we must save the past. My simple rule of thumb, then, is this: when you cut down a tree, what you make from it should be at least as miraculous as what you cut down.

In some ways, art is the most terrifying of human inventions. It preserves the right to undermine all the categories. The history of art is the history of iconoclasm, the history of some new voice saying that everything you know is wrong.

Life has a way of talking to the future. It's called memory.

Yesterday's political criminals are on today's postage stamps!

The trees have vanished and the town forgets. But not the land.

His hand goes out, gesturing toward the conifers. It amazes me how much they say, when you let them. They're not that hard to hear. The (other) man chuckles. We've been trying to tell you that since 1492.

The product here is not so much books as that goal of ten thousand years of history, the thing the human brain craves above all else and nature will die refusing to give: convenience. Ease is the disease ...

the word tree and the word truth come from the same root.

And yet, places remember what people forget.

the ill, insane, and disabled: all changed, unthinkably, over the centuries, into persons by the law.

English first swarmed a continent that rose from the ocean overnight, seeking masts for their leviathan frigates and ships of the line, masts that no place in all stripped Europe, not even the farthest boreal north, could any longer provide.