Quotes About History

Pliny the Elder wrote once: "If anyone will consider the abundance of Rome's public supply of water, for baths, cisterns, ditches, houses, gardens, villas; and take into account the distance over which it travels, the arches reared, the mountains pierced, the valleys spanned—he will admit that there never was anything more marvelous in the whole world.

History has a pulse, they say- but mostly I have never been able to hear it, not even when its drumming in my goddamn ears.

For a group of nationalist intellectuals much later in history to have sat down and decided that Dante's Italian would now be the official language of Italy would be very much as if a group of Oxford dons had sat down one day in the early nineteenth century and decided that—from this point forward—everybody in England was going to speak pure Shakespeare.

since Moses was in nappies.

I would like to be like Rome when I am an old lady.

as the years pass—there comes to be a terrible shortage of your people. The ones you loved. The ones who knew the people that you both loved. The ones who know your whole history.

If I'd known then what I know now—namely: that so many of those beautiful young boys would soon be lost to the battlefields of Europe or to the infernos of the South Pacific—I would have had sex with even more of them. If it sounds like I'm being facetious, I'm not.

I met an old lady once, almost one hundred years old, and she told me, There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history: How much do you love me? and Who's in charge? Everything else is somehow manageable. But these two questions of love and control undo us all, trip us up and cause war, grief and suffering.

The earliest evidence of recognizable human art is forty thousand years old. The earliest evidence of human agriculture, by contrast, is only ten thousand years old. Which means that somewhere in our collective evolutionary story, we decided it was way more important to make attractive, superfluous items than it was to learn how to regularly feed ourselves. The

Oi'm always noble, sir; it's in my blood. 'As been ever since Oi ate that knight a few years back. Why?

For the first time, I had been struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face.

It's a shame for women's history to be all about men--first boys, then other boys, then men men men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over whenever they occurred. (Our teachers deplored this and added extra units about social history and protest movements, but that was still the message of the books.)

These atheist cultures were certainly diligent in preserving the relics of their saints.

History it seemed could be something entirely different a splash of blood whose agony didn't fade overnight or over centuries.

These are works of history about your century, the twentieth. A fine century-I look forward to the rest of it.

He brought his great hand to rest on an early edition of Bram Stoker's novel and smiled, but said nothing. Then he moved quietly away into another section.

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history's terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you've seen that truth—really seen it—you can't look away.

We Gypsies know that where Jews are killed, Gypsies are always murthered too. And then a lot of other people, usually.

Not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it.

It's a shame for a woman's history to be all about men-first boys, then other boys, then men, men, men. It reminds me of the way our school history textbooks were all about wars and elections, one war after another, with the dull periods of peace skimmed over when they happened.

In your country you don't care about history, and in my country we cannot recover from it.

I felt sure…that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either.

History has taught us that the nature of man is evil, sublimely so. Good is not perfectible, but evil is.