Quotes About History

Of course, mankind would not have landed on the Moon in 1969, were it not for two things: conquered Nazi rocket technology and post-war anti-Communist paranoia in the United States.

The history of post-war Britain shows us that we are lousy at running our economy. We need someone to do it for us.

Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.

I was very lucky, I was part of the post-war period when everything had to be redone.

I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.

The Postal Service is huge - employing more than a half million people - and its history is long and complicated.

My dad is Japanese; he was an art director there. My mom is half-English, half-Argentinian. They met in Japan in the '70s. Her parents were diplomats posted there.

Christopher Columbus, as everyone knows, is honored by posterity because he was the last to discover America.

I thought I had to make an impact on history. I had to become the greatest choreographer of my time. That was my mission. Posterity deals with us however it sees fit. But I gave it 20 years of my best shot.

The game really started in 1969 with Pot Black, but in 1970, along came Alex Higgins and the game took off.

The man who has nothing to boast of but his illustrious ancestry is like the potato - the best part under ground.

Although Cronkite had once crash landed in a Dutch potato field under enemy fire, he chose instead to focus on celebrating the liberation of the Netherlands at the hands of the Free Dutch.

My great, great grandfather, Michael O'Hanson, fled the impending potato famine of Ireland and arrived in America in the early 1840s with his bride, Bridget. They headed for Philadelphia, the city of brotherly love and a mecca for Irish-Catholic immigrants then.

There are two things in Indian history - one is the incredible optimism and potential of the place, and the other is the betrayal of that potential - for example, corruption. Those two strands intertwine through the whole of Indian history, and maybe not just Indian history.

It took the United States until 1920 to give women the franchise and another 40 or 50 years to start utilizing women's potential. How many women of incredible potential did we fail and what achievements were lost to all because we never tapped that potential?

America has faced much more difficult times, including potential national extinction, without flinching.

The only way you'll have a pen of potential Romeos from your past to choose from is to actually have a past.

In other countries they have histories with revolutions and class movements. In America, people don't like to think of themselves like being in a lower class. They all like to think of themselves as potential millionaires.

We've lost our city. I fear it's potentially like Pompeii.

I don't want the United States to be Athens on the Potomac.

It's hard to imagine a time when lobster pots weren't part of a well-equipped kitchen, but America's love affair with the two-clawed crustaceans didn't start until the 1800s.

I discovered that bone china was a British invention, which had been developed by a pottery sited next to a slaughterhouse - 'bone' china, of course, contains bones, though we are inclined to forget that.

What I find so interesting is, Herbert Hoover in August 1928 said no country in the world was closer to abolishing poverty than the United States. And then, of course, we had the Great Depression.

Memphis is the place where rock was born and Martin Luther King, Jr., was killed. It's full of contradictions, abject poverty, and riches that only music can provide.