Quotes About History

The Hitler diaries affair is a monument to the cock-up theory of history.

shall never forget as long as I live the sensation of unrolling each of the eight books of Aristotle's Politics: tiny cylinders of minute Greek characters, the edges slightly damaged by damp from the caves in Asia Minor where they had been hidden for many years. It was like reaching back through time and touching the face of a god.

Fear is historically the strongest emotion in economics. Remember FDR in the Great Depression? It's the most famous quote in financial history: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." In fact fear is probably the strongest human emotion, period. Whoever woke at four in the morning because they were feeling happy?

He glanced around the reading room and closed his eyes, trying to keep hold of the past for a minute longer, a fattening and hungover middle-aged historian in a black corduroy suit.

All that will remain of us is what is written down.

These rough notes and our dead bodies must tell the tale -

It's like interviewing a new cleaner. Do you want someone who can give you the history of cleaning and the theory of cleaning, or do you want someone who'll just get down and clean your fucking house? They chose you because they think you'll clean their fucking house.

Com'è strano, pensò più tardi March, vivere la tua vita nell'ignoranza del passato, del tuo mondo, di te stesso. Eppure era così facile! Tiravi avanti giorno per giorno, seguendo il percorso che altri avevano tracciato per te, senza alzare mai la testa...sempre avvolto nella loro logica...dalla culla alla tomba. Era una sorta di paura. Bene, addio a tutto. Era una bella cosa lasciarselo alle spalle...qualunque cosa dovesse accadere adesso.

Appeasement is simply an attempt to redress those same wrongs.

It is at this point that I'm afraid you lose me. You want my country to go to war to prevent three million Germans joining Germany, on the off chance that you and your friends can then get rid of Hitler? Well, I have to say, from what I've seen today, he looks pretty well entrenched to me.

The kulaks were contagious. Their souls were contagious. They carried the spores of counter-revolution.

Robert Harris

The Munich conference," he muttered, "is a locomotive that cannot be stopped. In my opinion, it's useless even to try.

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? —Cicero, Orator, 46 BC

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as bad luck.

History does not record anywhere a religion that has any rational basis. Religion is a crutch for people not strong enough to stand up to the unknown without help.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.

A hundred years ago they'd have burned you as a witch… But I'm not a witch. I don't suppose any of them were.

So are you telling me… he composed his thoughts. Are you telling me that if you told the last story again, and changed the young woman to a young man, then somewhere in history that same young woman would suddenly grow a beard? Tallis laughed at the image. I don't know, she said. I suppose so.

The Law of the Twelve Tables, a Roman legislation circa 450 BC, actually required a father to put to death any deformed child (Cito necatus insignis ad deformitatem puer esto). (Modern moral philosophers, like Joseph Fletcher and Princeton University's Peter Singer, advocate the same thing.)

Were they among war's greatest heroes — or history's greatest mass murderers?

Cultism—like all totalism and fundamentalism—is a reaction against the potential confusions of protean openness. In that sense cultism is reactionary not only in its constraints on the self but on its efforts to stop the flow of history. Expressions of collective proteanism, one of which Václav Havel called "living in truth," can be viewed as a return to the resilience of the self and its dynamic relationship to the historical process.

What we call historical memory is a creature of time and place. Emotional and political needs of the present intersect with past events. For memory, like perception, can never be simply factual. All our memories are reconstructions.

The Wheel of Time turns, and Ages come and pass, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth comes again. In one Age, called the Third Age by some, an Age yet to come, an Age long past, a wind rose above the great mountainous island of Tremalking. The wind was not the beginning. There are neither beginnings nor endings to the Wheel of Time. But it was a beginning.