Quotes About History

The power of finance to effect such important transitions in world history is that it moves economic value forward and backward through time.

success as an apologist: Étienne Gilson called Orthodoxy 'the best piece of apologetic the century [has] produced'; it brought Dorothy L. Sayers back to Christianity, just as The Everlasting Man brought C. S. Lewis to his famous moment of conversion on Headington Hill. Much remains to be done before Chesterton's huge oeuvre can be adequately assessed as a major part of the cultural history of the last century.

What task could be more agreeable than to tell of the benefits conferred on us by our ancestors, so that you may get to know the achievements of those from whom you have received both the basis of your beliefs, and the inspiration to conduct your life properly?

The philosophies of one age have become the absurdities of the next, and the foolishness of yesterday has become the wisdom of tomorrow.

Varicose veins are the result of an improper selection of grandparents.

Más asombroso es que miren con horror un esqueleto festivo hecho de almíbar de colores los que veneran como corazón de la historia el cadáver tumefacto de un hombre bondadoso suspendido en el leño del martirio.

Desde el momento en que Colón vio cruzar por el cielo esos pájaros desconocidos y Rodrigo de Triana gritó bajo la noche esa palabra, aquí toda la tierra es el mapa de una ambición: forcejear por las selvas es el oficio de los brazos enguantados de acero, y los que se apropiaron de la tierra de otros no vacilan jamás en verter sangre, por amiga que sea, para sostener ante Dios que la propiedad es sagrada

Some are so very studious of learning what was done by the ancients that they know not how to live with the moderns.

This century hasn't got the lock on insanity.

for days or even weeks. It isn't rare to find destructive, even criminal behavior. There's such a big change, in fact, that two or three hundred years ago people with temporal lobe disorders were often considered to be possessed by a

Johannes Meintjes… is one of the more articulate South Africans of his generation. A prolific painter, he is also a fluent author in both English and Afrikaans. With unresting curiosity about South African national and regional history, he seems blessedly free from political or racial bias, and when he writes of nations or persons in conflict is alert to what is good or bad on both sides.

She'd always talk about how great Gandhi was. I'd tell her the only reason Gandhi survived after his first protest was that he was dealing with the Brits. If Stalin had been running India, he'd of been dead in a second, his name forgotten.

I am an historian of warfare; I often describe my job as similar to that of an oncologist. I study that which kills and hope that one day humanity will find a cure.

Back in the 1940s, when we started firing off atomic bombs to test them, this pulse wave was first noticed. Not much back then with those primitive weapons, but it was there. And here's the key thing: there were no solid-state electronics back in the 1940s, everything was still vacuum tubes, so it was rare for the small pulses set off by those first bombs to damage anything.

Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims' descendants [of the global south] will not. Muslims, like Jews, increasingly probe into and publicize their holocaust. The "deep past" already plays a significant role in the growth of Muslim sentiment toward the Christian North. It will play an important role in international affairs far into the future

Even if we, as northerners, choose to ignore this history, the victims' descendants will not

the Mongol rulers of what became Iran, a few Christian

A nation is a society united by delusions about its ancestry and by common hatred of its neighbors.

Events in the past may be roughly divided into those which probably never happened and those which do not matter.

Events in the past maybe roughly divided into those which and probably never happened and those which do not matter.

Dig a trench through a landfill and you will see layers of phone books like geographical strata or layers of cake.... During a recent landfill dig in Phoenix, I found newspapers dating from 1952 that looked so fresh you might read one over breakfast.

The average person in William Shakespeare's time lived no better than his counterpart in Homer's time.

Perversely, the greatest triumph in medical history—the germ theory of disease—destroyed the ideal of heroic medicine, replacing it with a kind of therapeutic fatalism.* As physicians were taught the bacterial causes of diseases, they also learned that there was little if nothing to do once a patient acquired one.

In 528, still the crown prince, not yet king, Khusro discovered that his father's Mazdakite allies were conspiring against the throne. Driven, perhaps, by a combination of loyalty, anger, and a desire to demonstrate a kingly sort of resolution, in 529 the prince arrested, tortured, and executed Mazdak, and followed up with a massacre of his followers. (The Mazdakites would one day serve as inspiration for Islam's dissident Shi'a.)