Quotes About History

Tradition is a guide and not a jailer.

They say that history is going on somewhere. They say it won't stop. I have held One picture still for a long time and waited.

Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.

We may prefer to see ourselves as masters of nature, controllers of all change and progress, exempt from the seasons of history. Yet the more we balk at seasonality and the more we try to eradicate it, the more menacing we render our view of time—and of the future.

The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1850s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II. All these Unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new

What these modern myths illustrate is this: Your generation isn't like the generation that shaped you, but it has much in common with the generation that shaped the generation that shaped you. Archetypes do not create archetypes like themselves; instead, they create the shadows of archetypes like themselves.

The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium, midway through the Oh-Oh decade. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood.

America, has fallen in the grip of the most portentous cycle in the history of mankind.

Turnings come in cycles of four. Each cycle spans the length of a long human life, roughly eighty to one hundred years, a unit of time the ancients called the saeculum. Together, the four turnings of the saeculum comprise history's seasonal rhythm of growth, maturation, entropy, and destruction:

We need to realize that without some notion of historical recurrence, no one can meaningfully discuss the past at all.

In America, as Mark Twain observed, nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.

When Aristotle said that poetry is superior to history because history only tells us "what Alcibiades did or had done to him," he had in mind history as the mere compilation of facts. To matter, history has to do more. It has to reconnect people, in time, to what Aristotle called the "timeless forms" of nature.

America, as Mark Twain observed, nothing is older than our habit of calling everything new.

The farther backward you look, the farther forward you are likely to see," Winston Churchill once said.

During each of these previous Third Turnings, Americans felt as if they were drifting toward a cataclysm. And, as it turned out, they were. The 1760s were followed by the American Revolution, the 1850s by Civil War, the 1920s by the Great Depression and World War II. All these Unraveling eras were followed by bone-jarring Crises so monumental that, by their end, American society emerged in a wholly new form.

Two centuries later, the Enlightenment transmuted Christian linearism into a complementary secular faith, what historian Carl Becker called "the heavenly city of the eighteenth-century philosophers"—the belief in indefinite scientific, economic, and political improvement.

In other words, the most notorious, plain, and victorious truth of God is that God participates in our history - even yours and mine. Our history - all our anxieties - have become the scene of His presence and the matter of his care. We are safe. We are free. Wherever we turn we shall discover that God is already there. Therefore, wherever it be, fear not, be thankful, rejoice, and boast of God.

History knows that it can wait for more evidence and review its older verdicts; it offers an endless series of courts of appeal, and is ever ready to reopen closed cases.

In treading upon the ashes of dead men in Italy, Egypt - on the banks of the Bosphorus, one almost despairs to think how idle are the dreams and toils of this life, and were it not for the intellectual pleasure of knowing and learning, one would almost be damaged by travel in these historic lands.

I beg to present you as a Christmas gift the city of Savannah.

The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted.

just as twenty years ago, everyone knew John Colter and Jim Bridger.

My opposition is based on two grounds; first, the right of every rational being to become a "Priest unto himself," and by the test of enlightened reason, to form his own unbiassed judgment of all things natural and spiritual: second, that the reputation of the Bishops who extracted these books from the original New Testament, under the pretence of being Apocryphal, and forbade them to be read by the people, is proved by authentic impartial history too odious to entitle them to any deference.

He was a regular Yankee from New England. The Yankees are noted for making the most cruel overseers.