Quotes About History

Hitler was a vegetarian.

And historians have now discovered an even earlier Thanksgiving than the 1621 Plymouth celebration that English-American historians made famous. Half a century before Plymouth, early American settlers celebrated Thanksgiving with the Timucua Indians in what is now Florida —the best evidence suggests that the settlers were Catholic rather than Protestant, and spoke Spanish rather than English. They dined on bean soup.

We celebrate together, and that makes sense. And we don't just gather, we eat. This wasn't always so. The federal government first thought to promote Thanksgiving as a day of fasting, since that was how it had been frequently observed for decades.

Producing and eating our own food is, historically, much of what made us Americans and not subjects of European powers. While other colonies required massive imports to survive, early American immigrants, thanks to help from Native Americans, were almost entirely self-sustaining.

Despite the name, Spanish flu struck the entire world — that's what made it a pandemic instead of simply an epidemic. It was not the first influenza pandemic, nor the most recent (1957 and 1968 also saw pandemics), but it was by far the most deadly. Whereas AIDS took roughly twenty-four years to kill 24 million people, the Spanish flu killed as many in twenty- four weeks.

os nossos historiógrafos, há seis mil luas, não fazem referência a outras regiões senão aos dois grandes impérios de Lilipute e de Blefuscu. Estas duas poderosas potências têm, como ia dizendo, andado empenhadas, durante trinta e seis luas, numa guerra

No sabemos lo larga que es nuestra historia pero sentimos su peso.

It may be that universal history is the history of the different intonations given a handful of metaphors.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.

It also occurred to him that throughout history, humankind has told two stories: the story of a lost ship sailing the Mediterranean seas in quest of a beloved isle, and the story of a god who allows himself to be crucified on Golgotha.

My taste runs to hourglasses, maps, seventeenth-century typefaces, etymologies, the taste of coffee, and the prose of Robert Louis Stevenson.

All language is a set of symbols whose use among its speakers assumes a share past

There is no intellectual exercise that is not ultimately pointless. A philosophical doctrine is, at first, a plausible description of the universe; the years go by, and it is a mere chapter -- if not a paragraph or proper noun -- in the history of philosophy.

Sometimes a few birds, a horse, have saved the ruins of an amphitheater.

Modificar el pasado no es modificar un solo hecho; es anular sus consecuencias, que tienden a ser infinitas

Cuando uno extraña un lugar, lo que realmente extraña es la época que corresponde a ese lugar; no se extrañan los sitios, sino los tiempos.

Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion. Francis Bacon: Essays, LVIII

Historical truth, for him, is not what has happened; it is what we judge to have happened.

Words, displaced and mutilated words, words of others, were the poor pittance left him by the hours and the centuries.

Others died, but it happened in the past, The season (as all men know) most favorable for death. Is it possible that I, subject of Yaqub Almansur, Must die as roses had to die and Aristotle?

El pasado es la sustancia de que el tiempo está hecho; por ello es que éste se vuelve pasado en seguida.

One is allowed to change the past: the present is so stubborn.

What is past is what is real.

La historia era increíble, en efecto, pero se impuso a todos, porque sustancialmente era cierta. Verdadero era el tono de Emma Zunz, verdadero el pudor, verdadero el odio. Verdadero también era el ultraje que había padecido; sólo eran falsas las circunstancias, la hora y uno o dos nombres propios.