Quotes About History

look backward for answers to future problems may be left behind.

It must be admitted, truth compels me to admit, even here in the presence of the monument we have erected to his memory, Abraham Lincoln was not . . . either our man or our model. In his interests, in his associations, in his habits of thought, and in his prejudices, he was a white man.

All memory is prelude.

Grafton, Massachusetts, in early 1842, while working solo, Douglass was met by mob hostility in addition to an unwelcoming clergy. So he went to a hotel and borrowed a "dinner-bell, with which in hand I passed through the principal streets," he recalled, "ringing the bell and crying out, 'Notice! Frederick Douglass, recently a slave, will lecture on American Slavery, on Grafton Common, this evening at 7 o'clock."13

be included among those Americans the modern theologian Donald W. Shriver Jr. has called "honest patriots," those who manifest an ironic-tragic love of country by learning, narrating, and working through its past of contradiction and evil, and not by evading it.

Unfortunately for Ben and Granny, it turns out that ancient poo does still pong.)

She didn't know a lot about politics – yet – but she'd learned enough in her history classes to know politics could always be counted on to make a bad situation worse.

For three thousand years, the Egyptians held to a cyclical view that year after year proved itself to be true: the seasons came and went, life in the farms and villages remained basically the same, and the idea of progress was as foreign as soft-serve ice cream.

On the other hand, Clairaut reported that Lepaute exhibited an "ardor" that was "surprising"—perhaps surprising to him because Lepaute was a woman; he later removed the acknowledgment of Lepaute's considerable contribution from the published text. (Much of her later work was published without attribution by other people, including her husband, France's royal clockmaker.)

Civilizations, from the perspective of history, are shown to be the outcome of mixtures and borrowings, often of quite arbitrary things, but always on a prodigious scale.

Antiquity and modernity are cut from the same cloth. That is to say, our sense of things being 'ancient' is produced—both historically and in practice—by the sense that we ourselves are 'modern'.

The idea of civilization has always been linked to the desire for universal history; a history that transcends written records, extending back in time to the origins of our species, outwards in space to encompass the full range of contemporary human diversity, and—at least in its early formulations—onwards into some improved future condition.

God has never, in the history of mankind, allowed his name to go long offended.

It's all history out there, Clemens. Your history, my history. You and me, boy, not dates and things. You and me. That's what history is all about. How we came to be here, in the way we are, the clothes we wear.

The gh at the end of many modern words, however, like dough, cough, and trough, is actually an artifact not of Dutch orthographic tendencies, but of Norman distaste for the Middle English letter yogh, which looked like this: 3. Yogh fell out of use around the end of the fifteenth century.

Political loyalties can die hard, and there were probably those who pined after Absalom and told their children stories of the greatness that briefly existed, in the manner of old communists saddened by the demise of the world in which they were young.

They didn't have witch hunts because they believed in witches. They believed in witches so they could have witch hunts.

Six centuries ago, the pre-Colombian natives who settled here named this region with a word that in their language translates to, 'The Mouth of the Shadow.' Later, the Iroquois who showed up and inexplicably slaughtered every man, woman, and child in those first tribes renamed it a word that literally translates to, 'Seriously, Fuck this Place.

Alcohol was the reason we formed complex civilizations, and having to deal with the complexities of civilization is the reason most of us need alcohol.

The Peking man was a thinking being, standing erect, dating to the beginning of the Ice Age.

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

old houses move in their sleep like the dreaming, remembering limbs of very old people. Boards whisper, steps cry out softly to the whispering remembrance of footfalls long gone to earth. Mantelpieces strain gently in the darkness beneath the ghosts of old Christmas stockings. Joists and beams and rafters hunch lightly like the brittle ribs of old women in their sleep: the heart recalling, the worn carpet slippers whispering down the halls again.

The motivating force behind the UNDHR and the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees was a desire to ensure that never again would there be such suffering as that experienced in the wake of the Second World War. Unfortunately that is exactly what is happening now.

History's best thinkers eventually concluded that our flaws were too powerful to trust with freedom. Thus we've been groomed as hamsters in a wheel that benefits a laughing few. No more great works will be accomplished under the regime, because beauty is not democratic or profitable.