Quotes About History

When a history book contains no lies it is always tedious.

I never go into the country for a change of air and a holiday. I always go instead into the eighteenth century.

The history books which contain no lies are extremely tedious

Quanto aos romanos, não eram essencialmente militares, pois que fizeram conquistas vantajosas e duráveis, ao contrário dos verdadeiros militares, que tomam tudo e nada conservam, como os franceses.

Throughout history libraries have testified to what a civilization meant, or wanted to believe it meant.

To keep a story on a shelf or to remember then retell it means that it will be more likely to exist to those who come after we have gone.

The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

The problem is that one cannot easily build Charleston anymore, because it is against the law. Similarly, Boston's Beacon Hill, Nantucket, Santa Fe, Carmel—all of these well-known places, many of which have become tourist destinations, exist in direct violation of current zoning ordinances.

Modern history, both early and late, was made by Europeans, who "built a world around Europe", as historians "know", according to Braudel. That is indeed the "knowledge" of the European historians who themselves "invented" history and then put it to good use. There is not even an inkling of suspicion that it may have been the other way around, that maybe it was the world that made Europe.

Most economic histories of the "world" not only omit most extra-European production and exchange (even most of that outside West Europe or even northwest Europe); they neglect the participation of the productive and exchange activities of extra-European countries in the European, not to say world, process of accumulation and development. Moreover, they disregard the part that these productive and exchange relations played in the developing world system.

I am confident that future historical research will confirm that the expansion of the capitalist system over the past century has effectively and entirely penetrated even the apparently most isolated sectors of the underdeveloped world.

Then I despair... I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it always.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity — romantic love and gunpowder.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity -- romantic love and gunpowder.

Hence the charm of family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantomlike and almost undecipherable, are no longer traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny; not, however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process.

We owe to the Middle Ages the two worst inventions of humanity – gunpowder and romantic love.

We have met and hated, fought and died before - you and I.

They were only two in the thin web of men strung out through centuries of time with orders to seek out that which did not fit properly into the pattern of the past: to locate the enemy wherever in history or prehistory he had gone to earth.

I feel like I'm part of history being made. I leave Apple board meetings thinking, 'I've got to do a better job.'

Biology, list history, is not built with 'if's.

On 4 November 1944, the Barbados Observer wrote: Throughout the history of this island, it has been dominated by a small and selfish clique and it is indeed remarkable that now this clan senses that it has reached a crisis, it has actually had the shamelessness and temerity to publicly appeal to the people of this island and ask them to help them consolidate their weakening status.

Among history's greatest literary figures, Dickens' name is listed alongside Shakespeare's. He was the most widely read author of his time. Soldiers in the American Civil War carried his books to read aloud around nightly campfires. He was more popular in Russia than many of the great Russian novelists. His twenty novels are all still in print, and he remains popular today.

There is a confusing dual structure in the relationship of the individual to history. Even the sensory certainties of suffering follow a predictable order of physical reactions, so that the undeniable reality of their dizziness, queasiness, or nausea can be regarded with equal plausibility as the hysterical symptoms of a transitional period - a hypochondria of the epoch and not of individual people.

The politics of the day didn't interest her. What captivated her were historical events and developments and the millennia that preceded them.