Quotes About History

Pakistan's key leaders have succumbed to the assassin's bullet or bomb or the hangman's noose, and the country has seen four military coups since its birth in 1947. Yet the Pakistani polity has limped on.

During the Middle Ages, Jews were members of a semi-independent polity within a larger polity.

Many Americans remain very interested in royal goings-on in general, and not just because of their soap-opera appeal. To a greater degree than any other polity, Britain functions as Americans' defining 'other.'

History chalks up Mr. McKinley's War as a U.S. win, and he also polls favorably as a 'near great' president.

It always circled back around to Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. That always fascinated me because so few people make the connection between the two.

I got the feeling: It's time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.

I feel that Marco Polo has really been misrepresented - has never really gotten his due.

Excitement was plentiful during my two years' service as a Pony Express rider.

If you go back to 1800, everybody was poor. I mean everybody. The Industrial Revolution kicked in, and a lot of countries benefited, but by no means everyone.

That some are poorer than others, ever was and ever will be: And that many are naturally querulous and envious, is an Evil as old as the World.

Slaves and the descendants of slaves created world pop culture. Let's keep it real and be very respectful about that.

My pop culture ended somewhere north of Elvis but not too far.

The whole American pop culture started in Philadelphia with 'American Bandstand' and the music that came out of that city.

Black people, we built America, and we gave it all of its pop culture and all of its great musical genres.

Well, 'Terminator', it's just such an iconic movie in movie history. It's universal. I think it's part of the pop culture of the world.

There's a rich history at Westboro of parodying pop culture. The thing about pop culture is that it gives us a shared language. We were constantly trying to co-opt things that were popular to deliver our own message.

There are many pop stars who are great performers - but there is no chart-topping pop star in history who could play guitar like Prince.

In the late 1940s, there weren't any pop stars, and TV didn't exist.

No pope ever condemned slavery.

Everything present is included in the past somewhere; nobody's present pops out of nowhere.

I went and looked at one of these great cathedrals one day, and I was blown away by it. From there I became interested in how cathedrals were built, and from there I became interested in the society that built the medieval cathedral. It occurred to me at some point that the story of the building of a cathedral could be a great popular novel.

Ronnie O'Sullivan is the only player in history to be dominant and popular at the same time.

I think the fact that we don't really... that the world really doesn't acknowledge how bad and how detrimental colonialism was; that people don't really try to explore it, you know, in popular media and news articles; that... that it's just kind of glossed over as this thing.

I have a fondness for making paintings that go beyond just having a conversation about art for art's sake or having a conversation about art history. I actually really enjoy looking at broader popular culture.