Quotes About History

Then tell them, faintly, 'I heard screaming'. Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.

Was everyone nuts in medieval times? Doubtful. But their imaginations were more active. Their inner lives were rich and weird.

aureole of Saint Patrick banishing snakes

Charlotte would always try to make it personal. It was the reigning habit of mind in this land without history, this era when all relationships of time and space, of cause and effect, had been obliterated by the touch of a key. And so people were adrift, lacking any context by which to orient themselves, seeking to fill the breach with personal history, that diminutive, myopic substitute.

I began to settle down. The sun was low, the light rosy, the scrubby flora a parched, iridescent silver. The emptiness of the desert felt biblical, as if nothing had ever happened there—as if all of history were yet to come.

As a state we are so uniquely positioned in so many ways. Our geography, our placement in the country, and our history positions us to be the state that propels energy efficiency as an industry.

From a reality perspective, I'm sure part of that is true, but this is the largest blackout in U.S. history. If that is not a signal that we have got a problem that needs to be fixed, I don't know what is.

His explanation takes two minutes exactly. The shale lies a mile underground, has lain there since before there was a Pennsylvania, before a single human being walked the earth.

The story of my family. . .changes with the teller.

The Union as it was, the Constitution as it is,

Skye set her glass down. "Don't you dare rewrite history. What do you think it was like for me? Son after son—and every single one of you preferred my father.

How long has this place been bricked up?

Everything is something in Hawthorne House.

Because we can. Because when people say that well-behaved women rarely make history, they leave out the little tidbit that the women who do make history rarely do so alone.

This was what it meant to be a Hawthorne. This should probably be in a museum, but my brothers and I like to hit things with it instead.

Each photo is like a novel I can never open, Gary had explained once. I can hold it in my hand and only begin to imagine what's inside -- the lives these people might have led. Sometimes if there was a little clue on the photo - a name, date, or place - he'd try to research it...

May 13 Deduction. Reduction. Redaction. How much has been redacted from the carefully curated version of our story?

Q: Bury deep, Pile on stones, Yet I will Dig up the bones. What am I? A: Memories — A FOLK RIDDLE

Why do people report themselves to be as happy as they were back when we all had less? Well, for one thing, we are comparing two societies that are both majestically wealthy in comparison to almost all societies throughout history. Neither the surveyed Americans of the 1950s nor those of the 2000s were struggling with endemic distress- hunger, pain, humiliation. And average people who are not in such distress are statistically more likely to call themselves happy than not.

We seem obsessed with motivation, rallying ourselves to something beyond the life available to us right now, and we treat this motivation as if it were a major part of the history of wisdom, which it is not.

The history of doubt is not only a history of the denial of God; it is also a history of those who have grappled with the religious questions and found the possibility of other answers.

In 1912, a man named Franz Reichelt jumped off the Eiffel Tower wearing a parachute suit he designed himself. He jumped to test his invention--he expected to fly--but instead he fell straight down, hitting the ground like a meteor and leaving a 5.9-inch-deep crater from the impact. Did he mean to kill himself? Doubtful. I think he was just cocky, and also stupid.

Aprons don't hold us back-- they take us back

It is always the Germans who cause the trouble, what is it about Germans that they must molest and oppress?... They have never been civilized, said Sosthene...They were never conquered by Roman. They remain barbarians. Phoebe stared at him. It was a viewpoint... One is perhaps inclined to forget that even here in Britain that were four hundred years of the Pax Romana, he said gently. In Germany, no -- only the Vandals and the Goths. Every so often they burst out. It is in the breed.