Quotes About History

When the Nazis took Paris, the director of the Toledo Museum of Art wrote to David Finley, director of the not yet opened National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to encourage the creation of a national plan, saying, "I know [the possibility of invasion] is remote at the moment, but it was once remote in France.

Here, Mortimer Wheeler thought, is power. And a reminder of our mortality.

Those who had benefited from the false stories of Altaussee had been working behind the scenes to defeat the petition. Without

At a point where the destruction widened out, leaving a vast field of broken lintels and cornerstones, some GIs had posted a sign with a quote from Hitler: "Gebt mir fünf Jahre und Ihr werdet Deutschland nicht wiedererkennen." Below was the English translation: "Give me five years & you will not recognize Germany again.

World War II had exposed millions of young American men and women to the art and architecture of Europe and Asia and almost overnight created an interest in and appreciation for the arts that would normally require generations to nurture.

wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?

Robert M. Gates

It tempted Clinton, Bush, and even Obama to think we could change other countries, despite history and culture, and make them more like us. Contrary to Machiavelli's warning, they misjudged our power and our resources.

Until al Qaeda attacked the United States on September 11, 2001, Hizballah had killed more Americans than had any terrorist group in history.

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past.

It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it.

Your common sense is nothing more than the voices of thousands and thousands of these ghosts from the past. Ghosts and more ghosts. Ghosts trying to find their place among the living.

It's an old split. Like the one between art and art history. One does it and the other talks about how it's done and the talk about how it's done never seems to match how one does it. DeWeese

Dialectic, which is the parent of logic, came itself from rhetoric. Rhetoric is in turn the child of the myths and poetry of ancient Greece. That is so historically, and that is so by any application of common sense. The poetry and the myths are the response of a prehistoric people to the universe around them made on the basis of Quality. It is Quality, not dialectic, which is the generator of everything we know. The

Things that seem morally obvious and intuitive now weren't necessarily so in the past; many started with nonconforming reasoning.

A high incidence of 7R, associated with impulsivity and novelty seeking, is the legacy of humans who made the greatest migrations in human history.

Roughly half a million people died in the Roman Colosseum to supply audiences of tens of thousands the pleasure of watching captives raped, dismembered, tortured, eaten by animals.

Culture leaves long-lasting residues—Shiites and Sunnis slaughter each other over a succession issue fourteen centuries old; across thirty-three countries population density in the year 1500 significantly predicts how authoritarian the government was in 2000; over the course of millennia, earlier adoption of the hoe over the plow predicts gender equality today.

The United States was not without labor-intensive agriculture historically. But rather than solving that with collectivism, it solved it with slavery.

All the knowledge that has led our species from wearing animal skins to people flying, complete with proofs, would fill a handful of reference books, but a bookcase the size of the earth would not suffice to hold all the rest, quite apart from the vast discussions that are conducted not with the pen but with the sword and chains.

Er blätterte in den dicken, alten Alben mit Lichtbildern seiner Familie, [...], und je näher er den Anfängen dieser neuen Bildkunst zu blätterte, desto stolzer, kam ihm vor, hatten sich die Menschen ihr dargeboten.

Dabei ist es wahrscheinlich, dass wir großen Geschäftsleute dazu berufen sind, bei der nächsten Wendung der Geschichte die Führung der Massen zu übernehmen, ohne dass wir wissen, ob wir seelisch dazu imstande sein werden!

Historical sense and poetic sense should not, in the end, be contradictory, for if poetry is the little myth we make, history is the big myth we live, and in our living, constantly remake.

you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is, in other words, History, and what you are is an expression of History.