Quotes About History

How can a man with your heritage not be able to tap-dance." I heard Hawk's gliding chuckle. "My ancestors busy eating missionaries, boy.

Travel backwards in time? I don't see any future in it.

Look into our histories, and you shall almost meet with no other subject but what a company of hare-brains have done in their rage.

I'm afraid, Gringo, I must agree with our distinguished folklorist and foremost witness to the ontological revelations of the patterns of history,' intercedes (with a respectful nod to Schultz) Professor Costen Migod McCamish, Doctor of Nostology and Research Specialist in the Etiology of Homo Ludens, 'and have come to the conclusion that God exists and he is a nut.

The great gulf between the story told by the young reporters and the story that military people knew as their truth may be the reason that, almost a half century later, the Vietnam War remains the source of a cultural rift in America. Today a small but growing group of writers is looking back and finding a different story than the one told by many reporters of the day.

Their history was in their eyes, and their sacrifices in their scars.

AFTER World War II, General Holland M. Smith said that if Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, the great battles of the Pacific were won in the Caribbean.

The Dining Out is a formal affair rooted in ancient history. From pre-Christian Roman legions, to marauding Vikings, to King Arthur's knights, a banquet to celebrate military victories has long been customary among warriors. British soldiers brought the practice to colonial America, where it was adopted by George Washington's army. Close bonds between U.S. Army Air Forces pilots and Royal Air Force (RAF) officers during World War II cemented the custom in the U.S. military.

What if miliseconds influence centuries?

The United States fought against the prospect of a Vietnam unified by the communist North. But once that unification became fact, the new and enlarged Vietnamese state became a much greater threat to communist China than to the United States. Such can be the ironies of history. Champa

Civilizations often prosper in opposition to others. Just as Christendom achieved form and substance in opposition to Islam after the latter's conquest of North Africa and the Levant in the seventh and eighth centuries, the West forged a definitive geopolitical paradigm in opposition to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

The historian John Keegan explains that America and Britain could champion freedom only because the sea protected them "from the landbound enemies of liberty.

Mongol-Turkic invasions were arguably the most significant event in world history in the second millennium of the common era, and it was mainly because of the use of certain animals tied to geography.

In 1945, there were 20,000 mosques in Turkey; in 1985, 72,000, and that number has since risen steadily, out of proportion to the population.

the boundary zone that divides the East from West Germany Ã¢â'¬Â¦ is one of the oldest in history," the one which separated Frankish and Slavonic tribes in the Middle Ages. In other words, there was little artificial about the frontier between West and East Germany.

Without the Indian Subcontinent, in other words, there could not have been a Vietnam in any cultural or aesthetic sense.

idea of Central Europe has a "fatal geographical flaw." Central Europe, Mackinder and Fairgrieve tell us, belongs to the "crush zone" that lays athwart Maritime Europe, with its "oceanic interests

the two world wars were about whether or not Germany would dominate the Heartland of Eurasia that lay to its east, while the Cold War centered on the Soviet Union's domination of Eastern Europe

The American narrative is morally unresolvable because the society that saved humanity in the great conflicts of the twentieth century was also a society built on enormous crimes—slavery and the extinction of the native inhabitants.

keep in mind always Isaiah Berlin's admonition from his celebrated lecture delivered in 1953, and published the following year under the title "Historical Inevitability," in which he condemns as immoral and cowardly the belief that vast impersonal forces such as geography, the environment, and ethnic characteristics determine our lives and the direction of world politics.

It was the union of Franks, Goths, and Roman provincials against these Asiatics that produced the basis for modern France.

Realism is alien to the American tradition

Beyond Cina and the Athenaeum stretched Pia?a Revolu?iei, the vast square holding the former royal palace and Communist Party headquarters, where tanks had rolled and the streets had run with blood during the uprising against Ceau?escu in December 1989, the singular event which terminated the Cold War in Europe.

Robert D. Kaplan