Quotes About History

Humans are so frail. How have they survived long enough to wreak all the shit they have?

Earth's atmosphere at different times in history." You can't predict the past, Dad. "You can if you don't know it yet.

You live between three trees. One is behind you. The Lote - the tree of life for your Persian ancestors. The tree at the boundary of the seventh heaven, that none may pass. Ah, but engineers have no use for the past, do they?

He tells her how the word beech becomes the word book, in language after language. How book branched up out of beech roots, way back in the parent tongue. How beech bark played host to the earliest Sanskrit letters.

They can't see that time is one spreading ring wrapped around another, outward and outward until the thinnest skin of Now depends for its being on the enormous mass of everything that has already died.

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 and Nick is its vector. His employers are a virus that will one day live symbiotically inside everyone. Once you've bought a novel in your pajamas, there's no turning back.

On segregation, the presidency has held silent since Reconstruction.

À ce stade tardif de l'histoire, tout n'était que marketing. Les universités étaient contraintes de développer leur marque. Toute action charitable devait battre tambour. Les amitiés se mesuraient en partages, en likes, en liens. Poètes et prêtres, philosophes et pères de jeunes enfants : nous étions tous engagés dans un business total et sans fins.

He loved the benevolence that the stacks held out, their map of the known world. He loved the all-you-can-eat buffet of borrowing. He loved the lending histories stamped into the front of each book, the record of strangers who checked them out before him. The library was the best dungeon crawl imaginable: free loot for the finding, combined with the joy of leveling up.

But the spruces pour out messages in media of their own invention. They speak through their needles, trunks, and roots. They record in their own bodies the history of every crisis they've lived through.

TWENTY SPRINGS is no time at all. The hottest year ever measured comes and goes. Then another. Then ten more, almost every one of them among the hottest in recorded history. The seas rise. The year's clock breaks. Twenty springs

IT'S INDIANA, 1990. Here, five years is a generation, fifty is archaeology, and anything older shades off into legend. And yet, places remember what people forget.

1. Human history was the story of increasingly disoriented hunger.

The past always comes clearer, in the future.

The paving of the Kinshasa Highway affected every person on earth, and turned out to be one of the most important events of the twentieth century. It has already cost at least ten million lives, with the likelihood that the ultimate number of human casualties will vastly exceed the deaths in the Second World War

Food is packed with meaning, as well as vitamins, carbohydrates and protein. It satisfies needs beyond those of the body and the pocketbook. Food is a medium to build families, religious communities, ethnic boundaries and a consciousness of history.

People want to think of a food tradition as something that would continue unchanging and timeless, unless some outside force knocked things askew.

How old does a recipe have to be in order to be traditional? What should we think when an old industrial food like salted (corned) beef or pickled herring becomes a part of "traditional" ethnic cuisine?

Science grew out of the craft tradition

Anti-Semitism had a long history in the West and pervaded European society.

Protocols of the Elders of Zion, supposedly a transcription of a secret Jewish council's plans to subvert legitimate governments and take over the world, were sold internationally in the 1920s and 1930s; Henry Ford took the forgery as literally as Adolf Hitler did.

About one hundred refugee physicists emigrated to the United States between 1933 and 1941.

The 509th commander introduced Parsons, who wasted no words. He told the crews the bomb they were going to drop was something new in the history of warfare, the most destructive weapon ever made: it would probably almost totally destroy an area three miles across.

We must be curious to learn how such a set of objects—hundreds of power plants, thousands of bombs, tens of thousands of people massed in national establishments—can be traced back to a few people sitting at laboratory benches discussing the peculiar behavior of one type of atom. Spencer R. Weart