Quotes About History

the memorial stained-glass window dedicated to the King's Own Yorkshire Light Infantry, on whose side God had been in two world wars, though this hadn't prevented them suffering heavy casualties.

I thought it best, finally, to start seeing where I've been rather than where I'm going.

It would indeed be a tragedy if the history of the human race proved to be nothing more than the story of an ape playing with a box of matches on a petrol dump.

The Metropolitan Health Act was the first of its kind in the United States. Many consider it a turning point in the history of American city life.

I still do think fondly about my days in Edendale and Mixville — the little-known corners of the city limits where the movies actually were born. Tucked into the once barren hills just west of Downtown were the studios of Western hero Tom Mix and fledgling cartoonist Walt Disney. Behind razor wire near Glendale Boulevard lingered a small stone monument to Comedy. Why? Because the ancient Selig Company had once made movies there.

We learn simply by the exposure of living, and what we learn most natively is the tradition in which we live.

He or she cannot clearly remember what happened when they were two, three, or four years of age. Worse, the reality of their developmental history has been clouded and denied by the effects of both the splitting and moral defenses. The result of this psychological conspiracy leaves one and only one recourse open for the victim: to unconsciously act out the same destructive pattern with the next generation of child-victims.

Christianity, like most religious traditions of any vintage, is inherently conservative.

Muslim scholar Ibn 'Arabi (1165–1240) wrote, "Every branch reverts to its root.

Above all, they cover two periods of time, one leading up to the first coming of the Messiah and one leading to the second. It's as if Daniel looked through a prophetic telescope and saw two 'peaks' of history, a lower in front of a higher, without realizing the length of the valley between them.

Uncle Eric holding court, proud the only time he ever left Yorkshire was to kill Germans.

We can't just erase the history we don't like, then there won't be any lessons to be learned.

You might not remember the days when doctors endorsed smoking cigarettes,

To quote Gary Taubes, "In fact, we can define this mild ketosis as the normal state of human metabolism when we're not eating the carbohydrates that didn't exist in our diets for 99.9 percent of human history. As such, ketosis is arguably not just a natural condition but even a particularly healthful one."28

hunter-gatherer ancestors consumed omega-6 and omega-3 fats in a ratio of roughly 1:1.

Warning: Drugs used to treat ADHD have resulted in cases of permanent Tourette's syndrome. Science has been documenting this since the early 1980s.10 Now that we have the research to prove the powerful effect of going gluten-free, it's time we change—no, make—history.

Americans like happy history—narratives that make us look smart, brave, and exceptional. We want a history that has been cherry-picked, one that ignores our mistreatment of the weak and disfavored—a history that can be celebrated at picnics, parades, and in smug conversations. This approach to history is neither honest nor mature.

Young visitors to the museum ask me, "What was it like to live during the civil rights struggle?" I gently tell them that we are living during the civil rights struggle. -David Pilgrim

That was how long ago?

metaphor' itself is not a static, ahistorical term; it is not as though there is a pervasive, universal concept of metaphor which can be applied, like a template, to all ages and cultures.

Metaphor thus becomes, crucially, a contested field; it also becomes visible as a weapon in the ideological armoury by means of which history is interpreted, or reinterpreted, from the perspective of the conquerer.

The fossil record shows that no other species of large-bodied beast—above the size of an ant, say, or of an Antarctic krill—has ever achieved anything like such abundance as the abundance of humans on Earth right now.

If SARS had conformed to the perverse pattern of presymptomatic infectivity, its 2003 emergence wouldn't be a case history in good luck and effective outbreak response. It would be a much darker story.

In other words, HIV hasn't happened to humanity just once. It has happened at least a dozen times—a dozen that we know of, and probably many more times in earlier history.