Quotes About History

Based on history, many presidents come into office with lots of plans, and an agenda and things they want to start and an order in which they want to do those things.

I think that, ultimately, my father-in-law will change the United States for the better, restore pride to our country and go down in history as one of the greatest Presidents.

All of the American presidents, certainly all of the notable ones, have been pretty original.

Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats.

Lincoln had bad press, too. He wasn't appreciated until after he was gone.

Raised in a house filled with old books, I'm drawn to them: the dust jackets that call out a historical moment, the marbled boards, the words pressed into the page with movable type.

What's most explosive about historical fiction is to use the fictional elements to pressure the history to new insights.

The novel has always been a contradictory form. Here is a long form narrative mainly read originally by consumers who were only newly literate or limited in their literacy. The novel ranked below poetry, essay and history in prestige for a long time.

While I knew that individuals had in history - and still could - make a difference, it seemed presumptuous - even pompous - to imagine that I could be part of it, that I could be one of them.

The Europeans not only colonialized most of the world, they began to colonialize information about the world and its people. In order to do this, they had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they had previously known abut the Africans.

It's not like I pretend the past doesn't exist or that I'm not proud to be a part of it.

We, in America and Great Britain, have never had to live with evil and ignore it, or pretend it wasn't happening, as people did all over Europe, and indeed, even in Germany herself.

China is a civilization pretending to be a nation.

History is filled with weird but true stories of social contagion - from dancing manias in the Middle Ages to nuns pretending to be cats in the 19th century to laughing epidemics of Tanzanian school girls in the 1960s.

Early on, I said to myself that I would like to write a kind of moral and spiritual history of a place. It sounds a little pretentious, I know. But that's really what I set for myself.

It's important to remember that, in the 1930s, a lot of people in the West looked at communism as a pretty good idea. That was partly because they didn't know how bad things were on the communist side of the world, but it was also partly because things were bad in the West.

New York basketball's been pretty good over the years.

The Roman Catholics must know as well as we do that 'Popery' when encouraged by government has always been dangerous to the liberties of the people.

I like Daniel Craig. I worked with him on 'Sharpe,' one of the very early ones, maybe the second one we did - 'Sharpe's Revenge?' A long, long time ago, and he was good in that then.

I discovered I'm 60 per cent Viking. Well, more Danish, I suppose. I'm also two-and-a-half per cent Neanderthal.

I want to validate that I'm the greatest daredevil in daredevil history.

The South is just a dark place, man.

Every country has a dark side of their history.

There was more data transmitted over the Internet in 2010 than the entire history of the Internet through 2009.