Quotes About History

I love Manchester. I love Manchester United. But I would really struggle to be creative there. I feel a bit lost, over-familiar maybe. Maybe too stuck in my own web of history.

The technological revolution is itself a direct descendant of the Ancient Greeks' historia, and the web is populated by young people who want to dive into the past.

The Internet has improved a lot in the last few years, but still, you wouldn't want to depend on Web sources for historical analysis. There's just something hard to beat about a book.

While the web is very much the first draft of history, a rough-cut, it still has to be good journalism, well-sourced, reliable. Clearly, the printed form is going to have more effort put into it, going to be more reflective and relevant.

Now, not every blog post or 'Top 10 Ways to Make Money on the Internet' piece deserves to live forever. But there's gold among the dross, and there are web publications that we would do well to preserve for historical purposes.

We started on April 1, 2003. So long ago, you couldn't watch video in a web browser; you had to watch it in a different player, like in Quicktime player or something like that.

The web is just another stunning point in the two-hundred-thousand-year history of human beings on earth. The taming of fire; the discovery of penicillin; the publication of 'Jane Eyre' - add anything you like.

When you close a tab or when you finish an article on the web, it's gone unless you go back into your history or search for it or explicitly try to find it. Apps on your phone have this special property: they hang around. In some ways, they're more like a book on a bookshelf than they are like web pages.

The Internet is the most democratic communication platform in history, largely because we've had network neutrality rules that make sure all web traffic is treated equally, and no voices are discriminated against.

I'm so grateful for archives like Wayback Machine, who for 15 years have been creating snapshots of almost the entire web.

A quick search through the U.S. Copyright Office's website will show that email was first used in 1979 and has been registered under 'Shiva Ayyadurai.'

I don't really have a treasured possession, but I do love my family's proper old photo album. We all have hundreds of photos on our phones now, but you can't beat the old albums stuffed with black-and-white wedding photographs and 1970s Polaroids.

People didn't just wear wedding dresses in the past. They also wore plain cotton shifts beneath them. As pretty as the dresses might be, and as lovely as they might look on display, if a museum doesn't hang the shifts beside them or acknowledge that the shifts existed, that exhibit's incomplete.

A walk through the storage facility of the community museum where I worked might easily have convinced you that people in the past wore only wedding dresses, carried silver candlesticks, and played with porcelain dolls.

Prop 8 did something that no other state in the history of this country has done. It took away the rights of people that already were legally affirmed. Imagine someone putting something on the ballot saying your wedding, your marriage is no longer valid.

The wedding ring on my left hand was bought by my grandfather, Samuel Miliband, in Brussels in 1920. I never knew him, as he died when I was one. But his ring was kept by my aunt until it was placed on my finger by my wife Louise 32 years later.

Gay weddings will be remembered as Tony Blair's greatest achievement!

When people refer to 'Back in the Day,' it was a Wednesday. Just a little fun fact for you.

My ma wanted to go and have a wee look at where all the Scottish kings had been buried. So we traipsed over Mull, in the pishing rain, with the parents desperately trying to find things to do as is the case with a holiday in Scotland, then on to Iona.

Slavery is a weed that grows on every soil.

I was born the year the Troubles began, in 1968. That world of violence was all I knew - people murdered, maimed, kneecapped, bombed. I don't remember a time without a major atrocity of some kind every week.

I've still got a scrapbook at home of the Munich air crash. I was an Arsenal supporter, and I went with my dad every week. I would have been 11 in 1958 and remember standing at Highbury for the Busby Babes. I remember that was the last game before they jetted off to Europe, and a lot of them never came back.

If pushed to say what I like about Elizabeth, who, as I'm sure most of you know, overtook Queen Victoria this week to become our longest-serving monarch, it would be her uncomplaining, getting-on-with-it ethic.

I was fortunate because my mum shared my love of film with me, so we would go to the movies twice, three times a week, and we would watch movies at home. As a teenager, instead of going out, we would have these huge movie nights in. But I almost failed drama at school. I hated it. It was all about the history of theatre.