Quotes About History

The past is relevant only as data.

Quid salvum est si Roma perit?" What is safe if Rome perishes?

Who are you?" I say. "Sawney Bean." I shake him a couple of times. "Sawney Bean? He died three hundred years ago and a million miles away. Try again, Porky." He laughs and grabs my arms. "I'm Sawney and I'll eat your guts for lunch." "Naming yourself after a dead cannibal might scare some people, but you're just a clown to me. Now tell me again why I shouldn't drop you out a window?

Are all these from dead men?" Steinmetz leaned against the cabin door. "They're not all men's, and yes.

They weren't a particularly bright people and disappeared along with their island in a volcanic mishap.

The only thing intact is a vellum scroll.

The 405 is one breakdown away from turning into the Donner Party.

Clearly, imagining cannot be expected to mean exactly the same thing today as it did in the Middle Ages or antiquity. For one thing, Aristotle and Aquinas never watched television.

Historians can set up all the conceptual walls they want, but they should not be surprised when medieval people pass through them freely, like ghosts. Nonetheless,

Organized Christianity has probably done more to retard the ideals that were its founders' than any other agency in the world.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

There once was a time when all people believed in God and the church ruled. This time was called the Dark Ages.

How can there be fury felt for things that are gone to dust.

Sebagai republik yang merdeka, Indonesia berusia lima puluh tahun, tetapi kedengaran lebih mirip sebuah kekaisaran tak terkendali daripada sebuah negara bangsa modern.

so then we had to find Jews to turn in so my father wouldn't die.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history--an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms--gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C.

No event in American history is more misunderstood than the Vietnam War. It was misreported then, and it is misremembered now.

The lesson of all history warns us that we should negotiate only when our military superiority is so convincing that we can achieve our objective at the conference table and deny the aggressor theirs.

You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference.

The greatest honor history can bestow is that of peacemaker.

In the long term we can hope that religion will change the nature of man and reduce conflict. But history is not encouraging in this respect. The bloodiest wars in history have been religious wars.

Life isn't meant to be easy. It's hard to take being on the top - or on the bottom. I guess I'm something of a fatalist. You have to have a sense of history, I think, to survive some of these things... Life is one crisis after another.

I don't think that a leader can control, to any great extent, his destiny. Very seldom can he step in and change the situation if the forces of history are running in another direction.

Man is constantly being assured today that he has more power than ever before in history, but his daily experience is one of powerlessness.