Quotes About History

There are no beautiful houses in England now. Only ruins, mental homes, and Government offices.

It's the most depressing-looking plaything I ever saw.' 'I want to pretend I live in it,' I said, 'and give masked balls.' My social history was eager but indiscriminate.

What we have in this great story, as I have proposed elsewhere, is not merely a report of history but an imagining of history that is analogous to what Shakespeare did with historical figures and events in his history plays.

History, sociology, economics, psychology et al. confirmed Joyce's view of Everyman as victim.

When the rose and the cross are united the alchemical marriage is complete and the drama ends. Then we wake from history and enter eternity.

Horror is the natural reaction to the last 5,000 years of history.

Human war has been the most successful of our cultural traditions.

For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.

But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.

The probability that a black student will have white classmates has dropped to what it was before 1954, when the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education declared separate schools inherently unequal.

Indeed, why even study history? The brief response is because our understandings of the past—who we are, where we came from, why we are here—inform our definitions of who we are in the present and have real implications and applicability for actions taken by us or in our name to shape the future.

In 1934, when the economy began emerging from the bottom of the Great Depression, it grew 7.7 percent. The next year it grew more than 8 percent. In 1936 it grew a whopping 14.1 percent.

History will show that the CEOs of America's largest corporations had the power to constrain the most dangerous, divisive, and anti-democratic president ever to occupy the Oval Office, but they chose not to use that power.

According to Commerce Department data, private sector wage gains over the last decade have even lagged behind wage gains during the decade of the Great Depression (4 percent over the last ten years, adjusted for inflation, versus 5 percent from 1929 to 1939).

Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing.

Hitler was one of the shrewdest manipulators of the scapegoating mechanism. He brought the deeply divided German nation of the 1930s together precisely by assigning the Jews as a scapegoat for the country's economic, political, and cultural woes.

If we looked at time and geography from a mountain's perspective, we would have a more profound sense of history, we would be able to see far and wide, and benefit from the experience of people all over the world. If we thought in the way mountains were formed, we would treat the natural world with more respect.

Fingerprints of the Gods

We are constantly being surprised that people did things well before we were born.

The phaenomena afforded by trades, are a part of the history of nature, and therefore may both challenge the naturalist's curiosity and add to his knowledge, Nor will it suffice to justify learned men in the neglect and contempt of this part of natural history, that the men, from whom it must be learned, are illiterate mechanicks... is indeed childish, and too unworthy of a philosopher, to be worthy of an honest answer.

Not needlessly to confound the herald with the historian, and begin a relation by a pedigree, I shall content myself to inform you [only gives, thankfully, his mother and father].

After 5000 years of recorded human history, you wonder, What part of 2,000,000 sunrises doesn't a pessimist understand?

As important as shared memories is the silent agreement that certain things never happened.

One must look hard through history to find when a clear understanding of the truth moved anyone to fire the first shot.