Quotes About History

some half-million pounds of First World War scrap is still collected from French and Belgian fields each year.

When Leopold turned over his colony to Belgium he burned all the state records, declaring, 'I will give them my Congo, but they have no right to know what I did there.') Truly, this is the aching heart of the story: how a population comprised of millions of souls, spread over nearly a million square miles, rich in language and music and deeply honored traditions, can be muted and erased.

every shell fired at the Boers, Lloyd George thundered, carried away with it an old-age pension.

history, when examined closely, always yields up people, events, and moral testing grounds more revealing than any but the greatest of novelists could invent.

The Irish, he told Lloyd George, were "like nothing so much as a lot of frightened children who dread being thrashed.

FORMER CONGRESSMAN ALBERT Sidney Burleson of Texas had landed in Wilson's cabinet thanks to his longtime patron, Colonel House. Burleson "has been called the worst postmaster general in American history," writes the historian G. J. Meyer, "but that is unfair; he introduced parcel post and airmail and improved rural service. It is fair to say, however, that he may have been the worst human being ever to serve as postmaster general.

of white men they are branded with a red-hot

today's Namibia. The killing there was masked by no smokescreen of talk about philanthropy. It was genocide, pure and simple, starkly announced in advance.

I began to read more. The further I explored, the more it was clear that the Congo of a century ago had indeed seen a death toll of Holocaust dimensions.

ivory in the nineteenth century was a more rare and expensive version of what plastic is today

During that long span of time, then, Jewish history would have to be written in other ways. It would become the story not of power, but of ideas and beliefs. And its most important turning points would not be the winning of wars or the building of monuments, but the writing of books.

The first printed Greek Homer had appeared in 1488, in Florence, published by an Athenian, Demetrius Chalcondyles

Among William Brewster's own children, landing at Plymouth Rock, were Fear, Love, Patience and Wrestling Brewster.

say, 'There never was such a person as Homer,'" the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841.

In those days, now it was in those days, In those nights, now it was in those nights, In those years, now it was in those years

As if on cue, in 1608, golf was introduced from Scotland for the first time, played around a 5-hole course on Blackheath, south of London. The leather balls, stuffed with feathers, lasted no more than one game each, particularly if it rained. At 5 shillings a time, it was a ruinously expensive but a strangely consoling pursuit, fitted to a country replete with contentment.

Europeans had lost the ability to read Greek

was found to be full of shreds of papyrus inscribed with Greek characters Ã¢â'¬Â¦ They seem to have formed the contents of the office of some public scribe, which have been dispersed and scattered by the wind over the adjoining desert.

Everyone alive in the tenth century who left descendants is the ancestor of every living European today, including Charlemagne, and his children Drogo, Pippin and, of course, not forgetting Hugh. If

Genetics is messy and mathematical, but powerful if deployed in the right way. People are horny. Lives are complex. A secret history is truly hidden in the mosaics of our genomes, but caveat emptor. No

In our family histories, the frontier between fact and fiction is vague, especially in the record of events that took place before we were born, or when we were too young to record them accurately; there are few maps to these remote regions, and only the occasional sign to guide the explorer.

There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.

et lorsque les armées victorieuses d'Annibal et de ses puissants alliés semblaient devoir apporter à Rome, d'un moment à l'autre, la destruction ou la servitude.

La libra de moneda escocesa contenía, desde los tiempos de Alejandro I hasta los de Robert Bruce, una libra de plata del mismo peso y ley que la libra esterlina inglesa.