Quotes About History

History cannot give us a program for the future, but it can give us a fuller understanding of ourselves, and of our common humanity, so that we can better face the future.

The past is always a rebuke to the present.

the Yankee dollar and Confederate dumbness combined to heal the wounds of four years of fratricidal strife. . .

We all knew the great lesson of history; I from reading it and they from living it. And the lesson is: it is more blessed to kill than to be killed.

They say the drowning man relives his life as he drowns. Well, I was not drowning in water, but I was drowning in West. I drowned westward through the hot brass days and black velvet nights. It took me seventy-eight hours to drown. For my body to sink down to the very bottom of West and lie in the motionless ooze of History, naked on a hotel bed in Long Beach, California.

What you are is an expression of history.

What sort of future is coming up from behind I don't really know. But the past, spread out ahead, dominates everything in sight.

According to the article, Douglass responds, "No, no, … I am Marshal Douglass in Washington; here let me be Fred Douglass again."41 Was Douglass in some odd way asking to be a slave again or to be treated as a kind of boy, as some of his critics at the time suggested?

Many reasons had been given, and every man adopted the rationale which suited his own particular emotionality. But what seemed obvious at the time became less so as the years passed. Professors of history argued, experts in economics demurred, psychologists begged to differ, and anthropologists felt it necessary to point out.

Love and war," he said, "are Earth's two staple commodities. We've been turning them both out in bumper crops since the beginning of time.

To enter the past is like poking a baseball bat into a spiderweb: it can't be done subtly or delicately.

Since the Bible text we have could not be any older than about 1300 B.C., this Sumerian myth must have been in circulation in the Mesopotamian region for at least a thousand years when the earliest text of Genesis was written.

I love museums more than any other institution the human race has invented. Museum people are always overworked and underpaid, and they all deserve sainthood, every one.

Bones and rocks are eloquent storytellers, if you know how to listen to them.

We only memorize historical dates and names, not the lesson.

History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great. Sadly, America is on that same course because we haven't learned from history. We only memorize historical dates and names, not the lesson." "Aren't prices supposed to go up?

The Worldly Philosophers

In the Information Age, the people who work the hardest physically will be paid the least. It is already true today and has been true throughout history.

After The Worldly Philosophers, I recommend reading The Creature from Jekyll Island by G. Edward Griffin, Paul Zane Pilzer's Unlimited Wealth, James Dale Davidson's The Sovereign Individual, Robert Preacher's The Crest of the Wave, and Harry Dent's The Great Depression Ahead.

In my reality, history does have a tendency to repeat itself, even though it may not repeat itself in exactly the same way.

It took the market approximately 25 years to recover to 1929 levels in the year 1955.

Her view of the future was hindered because her view of the future did not include enough of the past.

History proves that great civilizations collapse when the gap between the haves and have-nots is too great.

Historically, if people live to be 75 years of age, they live through two recessions and one depression.