Quotes About History

For out of old fields, as men saith, Cometh all this new corn from year to year; And out of old books, in good faith, Cometh all this new science that men learn.

History is the science of people.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run-and often in the short one-the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative.

History is the science of what never happens twice.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

I decline to accept Hebrew mythology as a guide to twentieth-century science.

The chief business of seventeenth-century philosophy was to reckon with seventeenth-century science... the chief business of twentieth-century philosophy is to reckon with twentieth-century history.

Sir Humphrey Davy Abominated gravy. He lived in the odium Of having discovered sodium. Said to have been written as a schoolboy during a chemistry class at St. Paul's School.

History, if viewed as a repository for more than anecdote or chronology, could produce a decisive transformation in the image of science by which we are now possessed.

[The Library of Congress] is a multimedia encyclopedia. These are the tentacles of a nation.

Futurism today is led by science-fiction writers, by sociologists, by historians. Now, I have nothing against them. I'm sure they do great work. But they're not scientists. They're clueless.

The history of atomism is one of reductionism – the effort to reduce all the operations of nature to a small number of laws governing a small number of primordial objects.

They [scientists of centuries past] call on God only from the lonely and precarious edge of incomprehension. Where they feel certain about their explanations, however, God gets hardly a mention.

Science fiction is like a blender - you can put in any historical experience and take influences from everything you see, read or experience.

The successive series of stratified formations are piled on one another, almost like courses of masonry.

The subject-matter of Archaeology is threefold-the Oral, the Written and the Monumental.

I think today the church faces a very real challenge in not repeating the errors of the past, in sort of a stand off, a fear of science.

Without adventure civilization is in full decay. ... The great fact [is] that in their day the great achievements of the past were the adventures of the past.

The search for historical laws is, I maintain, mistaken in principle.

There is not a discovery in science, however revolutionary, however sparkling with insight, that does not arise out of what went before.

Science should leave off making pronouncements: the river of knowledge has too often turned back on itself.

History is not the accumulation of events of every kind which happened in the past. It is the science of human societies.

The history of science, like the history of all human ideas, is a history of irresponsible dreams, of obstinacy, and of error.

A laboratory of natural history is a sanctuary where nothing profane should be tolerated. I feel less agony at improprieties in churches than in a scientific laboratory.