Quotes About History

I have had a place in New York in the musicians' district on the Upper West Side since 1986.

My dad claims that he was able to trace us back to the West Virginia Hatfields. When I look at the old pictures, the patriarchs have kind of a physical likeness to some of the men on the father's side of my family. I want it to be true.

And my parents live down in West Virginia, and I have to drive through the Shenandoah Valley pretty often to go visit them. You actually drive right by Gettysburg and some other spots where there were huge battles.

West Virginia built this nation... we deserve respect.

Well, you know, my grandmother actually grew up, you know, her whole family, my mom's family outside of Parkersburg, West Virginia.

But my family is connected to coal. There's hardly anybody in West Virginia that doesn't have a connection to the coal industry.

History will always regard Florida as the state that decided the Bush-Gore contest, but if Gore had carried Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, West Virginia or Kentucky - all states that his boss won twice - then he'd have won the election anyway.

When President Kennedy come to West Virginia, he spoke about West Virginia and the people that gave the people here pride. And my family, my father remembers when President Kennedy was in Logan County and at places like the smokehouse, standing on chairs, talking to people.

The concept of historical necessity is the product of rational thought and arrived in Russia by the Western route. The idea of the noble savage, of an inherently good human nature hampered by bad institutions, of the ideal state, of social justice and so forth - none of these originated or blossomed on the banks of the Volga.

In my office in Jerusalem, there's an ancient seal. It's a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu.

Never underestimate the ability of political leaders to misread history on a monumental scale. The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have both served to hasten western decline: they have both failed to achieve their objectives and in the process demonstrated an underlying western impotence.

Opera, next to Gothic architecture, is one of the strangest inventions of Western man. It could not have been foreseen by any logical process.

For a privileged minority, Western democracy provides the leisure, the facilities, and the training to seek the truth lying hidden behind the veil of distortion and misrepresentation, ideology and class interest, through which the events of current history are presented to us.

Modern science developed in the context of western religious thought, was nurtured in universities first established for religious reasons, and owes some of its greatest discoveries and advances to scientists who themselves were deeply religious.

In the schools of the Western countries, there is always the subject 'Religion.' The Classics are China's religion.

A leaderless but powerful network is working to bring about radical changes in the United States. Its members have broken with certain key elements of Western thought, and they may even have broken continuity with history... this benign conspiracy for new human agenda has triggered the most rapid cultural realignment in history.

I call on the Western democracies and primarily on the leader of the free world, the United States: Do not repeat the dreadful mistake of 1938, when enlightened European democracies decided to sacrifice Czechoslovakia for a convenient temporary solution... Israel will not be Czechoslovakia.

As the work proceeded we found that the western end of the cutting receded under the slope of the rock, and thus was partly roofed over by the overhanging rock.

The period western doesn't have a lot to say to most people today.

One of the best known, and one of the least intelligible, facts of literary history is the lateness, in Western European Literature at any rate, of prose fiction, and the comparative absence, in the two great classical languages, of what we call by that name.

At the end of the 30 Years War then, Europe broadly decided to separate the sacred from the secular in its political culture. I know that is an oversimplification, but it is instructive, and it led to a growth in religious tolerance that has characterized the best of Western life since.

When no other schools in the Southeastern Conference or the former Southwestern Conference would award them athletic scholarships, African Americans had been recruited by and playing for Texas Western since the 1950s.

Whether you like it or not, Paris is the beating heart of Western civilisation. It's where it all began and ended.

When I went to school, there were no Black philosophers, at least none that I was aware of, who were recognized by Western universities.