Quotes About History

Ulyanov moved to Petersburg in 1893,

Every president has to live with the result of what Lyndon Johnson did with Vietnam, when he lost the trust of the American people in the presidency.

I am trying to make clear through my writing something which I believe: that biography- history in general- can be literature in the deepest and highest sense of that term.

Does it make me a better person to read Cicero in the original? Cicero, for god's sake? The Alan Dershowitz of the Roman Republic?

The rattle of plates and cutlery was the sound of empires falling.

Violence is the great attractor of human history, Dr. Iverson. A force almost as irresistible as gravity.

But I don't consider history to be a field. It's just all the stuff that's happened so far. You have to call it a field so people who study what happened in the past can get a job teaching blank. But it doesn't seem to me that it's a subject.

The real purpose of the backward-glancing eye is to educate yourself constantly—you look at the past to learn from those who came before you.

Things that happened hundreds of years ago are very much a part of your thinking right now...The past lives in us.

Great courtiers throughout history have mastered the science of manipulating people.

Throughout history we witness continual cycles of rising and falling levels of the irrational. The great golden age of Pericles, with its philosophers and its first stirrings of the scientific spirit, was followed by an age of superstition, cults, and intolerance. This same phenomenon happened after the Italian Renaissance. That this cycle is bound to recur again and again is part of human nature.

They create in our thinking pronounced biases that are so deeply ingrained in us that we see evidence of them in all cultures and all periods of history. These biases, by distorting reality, lead to the mistakes and ineffective decisions that plague our lives. Being aware of them, we can begin to counterbalance their effects.

the source of their success (the various power players in history) could almost always be traced to one single skill or unique quality that separated them form the others.

First and foremost is the existence throughout history and in all cultures of people of high rationality, the types who have made progress possible. They serve as ideals for all of us to aim for.

Nothing is more important to a nation than its history. It is the earth upon which any society stands.

You cant build on a mass grave. Human beings are better than that - we have to be better than that - I do believe, don't you? Charlie McGuire, Fatherland

All civilisations consider themselves invulnerable; history warns us that none is.

This is the nightmare I have always dreaded. It's as if we've learned nothing from the last war and we are reliving August 1914. One by one the countries of the world will be dragged in - and for what?

History has always fascinated me. As Cicero himself once wrote: 'To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child. For what is the worth of human life, unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?' I quickly forgot the cold and could have spent all day happily unwinding that roll, poring over the events of more than sixty years before.

Everybody tends to heighten his own reality. We start with a private fantasy about our lives and perhaps one day, for fun, we turn it into an anecdote. No harm is done. Over the years, the anecdote is repeated so regularly it becomes accepted as a fact. Quite soon, to contradict this fact would be embarrassing. In time, we probably come to believe it was true all along. And by these slow accretions of myth, like a coral reef, the historical record takes shape.

The foundations of Empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

History wasn't made without taking risks, that much he knew. So maybe sometimes you had to take risks to write it, too?

History was a patchwork of voids. The great university libraries and public archives had mostly rotted away or been used as fuel in the Dark Age. An entire generation's correspondence and memories had vanished into this mysterious entity the antiquarians called 'The Cloud'.

church that he guessed must have stood square on this land for at least a thousand years; more likely fifteen hundred. Wrapped