Quotes About History

Talking about history is not like living it, I guess. Some people have more choice than others.

Perhaps that's why he became so interested in history, […] He felt that if you read everything and put the pieces all together the real truth would emerge. It would be, somehow, like carpentry. Everything would fit together just so, and you would see in the end something like 'a perfect building called the past.

Now, two centuries after George IV appeared resembling a tartan dumpling, few formal occasions are kilt-free. Lowland bridegrooms and their male guests routinely put on the dress of men who were believed by their ancestors to be sub-human savages.

Our nation is the sum of Scandinavian Scotland, Pictish Scotland, Irish Scotland, English Scotland and British Scotland.

Therefore, it is possible to say with considerable certainty that more than 40 per cent of all Scots, men and women, carry the DNA of the people of the painted caves.

Our history is written in our rocks just as surely as it is in monastic chronicles, census returns or the stones and bones of archaeological

Farmers have been extremely conservative. Throughout the world there are 148 species of large animals and yet only fourteen of these have been domesticated as farm animals, grown for meat, milk or wool, or all three, or used to supply muscle-power to pull carts, ploughs or carry people.

And with plant species the proportion which has been cultivated is even smaller. From 200,000 higher plant species, only 100 or so are grown for food. And almost all of these were first tended or cultivated in the fourth millennium BC in Europe.

Alistair Moffat

Caesar described

Archaeologists believe that wine-making began in Georgia and northern Persia some time between 6000 BC and 5000 BC.

As soon as tradition has come to be recognized as tradition, it is dead, something to which lip service is paid in the vain hope of edifying the kids.

Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

The fact that in Germany the politics were of the Right and in the United States of the Left should not mislead us. In both places the universities gave way under the pressure of mass movements, and did so in large measure because they thought those movements possessed a moral truth superior to any the university could provide. Commitment was understood to be profounder than science, passion than reason, history than nature, the young than the old.

In order to know such an amorphous being as man, Rousseau himself and his particular history are, in his view, more important than is Socrates quest for man in general or man in himself.

The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance.

more than 50 per cent of Amstetten's menfolk who had marched off to fight for Hitler did not make it back home.

Macbeth was played before the first Stuart king of Great Britain and Ireland, James VI of Scots and I of England, and this scene served as a compliment to him.

Over nineteenth-century telegraph wires OK would have been sent in the original Morse code, also known as American Morse or Railroad Morse, in the pattern dot-gap-dot dash-dot-dash, rather than dash-dash-dash dash-dot-dash of today's International Morse Code. The O was signaled by two dots with a long intracharacter gap to distinguish it from I, which used two dots with a short intracharacter gap.

Some folks is meant to make excuses. Some folks is meant to make history.

my aim in writing The Watch That Ends the Night was not to present history. My aim was to present humanity. The people represented in this book lived and breathed and loved. They were as real as you or me. They could have been any one of us.

This was, after all, an army whose cause was inextricably bound up with the defense of black enslavement.

Whatever the reason for enlisting, by 1865 the Union had sworn in 2,128,948 men, approximately one-third of the military-age male population of the northern states, while the Confederacy probably enrolled a little under 1 million men, about four-fifths of its military-age male population.