Quotes About History

The history of the area is overwhelming: Hitler, Mussolini, Tito, and Miloševi?, for example.

wanted to know how five years of Nazism followed by four and a half decades of Stalinism had affected this landscape and the people who inhabited it.

Romania, as I am forced to refer to it, constitutes one of those indigestible ethnic nations, like Georgia and Armenia, that have miraculously survived the millennia despite being oppressed, overrun, and vanquished.

Let no one be discouraged by the belief there is nothing one person can do against the enormous array of the world's ills, misery, ignorance, and violence. Few will have the greatness to bend history, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. And in the total of all those acts will be written the history of a generation.

The secret is to create the condition for change, a process that sometimes takes decades, and then use certain men as pivot points, a fulcrum to move history.

Studying history is for tourists - polite, tidy people with clean desks and clean consciences. Making history is for people willing to get their hands dirty, to make mistake and lie when necessary, so that someday historians can sit quietly at their desks and act shocked.

We can make a little order where we are, and then the big sweep of history on which we can have no effect doesn't overwhelm us. We do it with colors, with a garden, with the furnishings of a room, or with sounds and words. We make a little form, and we gain composure.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

Storyteller's Creed: I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

As these anecdotes illustrate, ritual refers to two kinds of acts: those things we do for the first time that, in fact, have been done by the human race again and again forever—and those patterns that we ourselves repeat again and again because they bring structure and meaning to our individual and collective lives.

Embassy Row in Washington, D.C., the summer I turned

It is comforting to know that some very old and very simple ways of getting from one place to another still work.

Learn to use the knowledge of the past and you will look like a genius, even when you are really just a clever borrower.

The dreamers, those who misread the actual state of affairs and act upon their emotions, are often the source of the greatest mistakes in history—the wars that are not thought out, the disasters that are not foreseen

Understand: we live in the world of a sad separation that began some five hundred years ago when art and science split apart.

The idea that the early Christian tradition was limited to its Greek and Latin expressions is still widespread. This assumption distorts historical reality and weakens greatly our understanding of the roots of Christian theology and spirituality. In the third and fourth centuries Syriac was the third international language of the church. It served as the major means of communication in the Roman diocese of the East, which included Syria, Palestine, and Mesopotamia.

The current fast food fuss obscures the reality that such foods are ancient. Fried kibbeh, sausages, olives, nuts, small pizzas, and flat breads have been sold on the streets of Middle Eastern and North African cities for a cycle of centuries; Marco Polo reported barbequed meats, deep-fried delicacies, and even roast lamb for sale in Chinese markets.

People come--they stay for a while, they flourish, they build--and they go. It is their way. But we remain. There were badgers here, I've been told, long before that same city ever came to be. And now there are badgers here again. We are an enduring lot, and we may move out for a time, but we wait, and are patient, and back we come. And so it will ever be.

While Morgan-who died in 1890 after falling off his horse-drawn carriage near the Italian border-must be remembered for laying the foundation for the House of Morgan

Instead of being described in the investment banking section, J.P. Morgan could as easily have been included in this section, as the last of the Dinosaurs, and perhaps the greatest and most powerful of them all.

Operating from his house, Mayer and sons Amschel, Salomon, Nathan, Carl, and James built the business into a strong importing house.

Mayer, still not content with the excess, next began operating a money exchange bureau in their yard. What's considered the very first Rothschild bank appeared to be a nine-square-foot hut-but things weren't quite what they appeared to be. Mayer installed a large iron chest that, when opened from the back, revealed a stairway leading to a secret storage cellar.

Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call 'the mandate of heaven', but life for the peasant changes little.

All of us know history repeats itself, but mighty few of us recognize the repetition until too late.