Quotes About History

avoirdupois

In the time of Servius Tullius, who first coined money at Rome, the Roman as or pondo contained a Roman pound of good copper.

I could write a guidebook about this city, this fallen city. Street by street, house by house, church by church. What happened in this building, who was betrayed, and by whom, in this apartment, who waited for whom on this street corner. And why the person never came.

As Mazzini put it, writing in 1849: 'The masters of the world had united against the future.' But they had also left a poisoned chalice no less toxic than the acqua tofana whose menace exerted such a spell. When the future caught up with them, in 1917-18, it detonated a series of events which would cost the lives of untold millions and lead to the near-destruction of European civilization.

It would be idle to propose that the arrangements made in 1815 caused the terrible cataclysms of the twentieth century. But anyone who attempted to argue that what happened in Russia after 1917, in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and in many other parts of central and southern Europe at various other moments of the last century had no connection with them would be exposing themselves to ridicule.

Four days before the declaration of World War II, on August 27, 1939, the test pilot van Chaim flew the first jet aircraft in the world, the Heinkel 178. Only a small circle of people directly concerned knew of this event, which for that time was of great importance. Exactly a year later, on August 27, 1940, the first Italian jet plane, the Caproni-Campini made its first flight. It reached 300 mph, and the event received great propaganda.

You ever read Thucydides? I'll boil him down for you into one easy moral: intergenerational civil war is a very bad thing.

more guilt, guilt, guilt. That's the Irish condition.

Geistesgeschichte

I stuck on the lunchtime news. More riots. Tedious now. Depressing. You ever read Thucycdides? I'll boil him down for you in one easy moral: intergenerational war is a very bad thing.

A tradition is a living argument. A living argument for a practice that began a long time ago.

There are many gifts a friend brings to a woman's life. History. Empathy. Honesty. Lucky was the woman who kept a childhood friend because that friend remembered what you looked like, who you were, and your people. Lucky was the woman who had a friend from the age of ten, when girls were brave, gutsy, and full of questions and had the time and pep to seek the answers. That friend knew who you really were. That friend had seen your soul.

There are many gifts a friend brings to a woman's life. History. Empathy. Honesty. Lucky was the woman who kept a childhood friend because that friend remembered what you looked like, who you were, and your people.

There are many gifts a friend brings to a woman's life. History. Empathy. Honesty. Lucky was the woman who kept a childhood friend because that friend remembered what you looked like, who you were, and your people. Lucky was the woman who had a friend from the age of ten, when girls were brave, gutsy, and full

Who would tell the story of the elephant when she was gone? A family was only as strong as their stories.

My memory is again in the way of your history

Had [Shakespeare] put into the mouths of his heroes only prophecies that were later confirmed, he would have made a case for the total predictability of history. The false prophets are there for a purpose; they testify to the unpredictability of the historical future.

If people can write to each other across space, why can they not write across time too?

History dies without the present. There is no future without the path made to it by the past.

Herzen declared that there were "no solutions": history, like nature, was an improvisation, subject to the play of chance.

the first global war began in 1754 with the killing of a French Canadian officer in America's backcountry. The slaying of Joseph Coulon de Villiers de Jumonville on May 28, 1754, forty miles south of the Forks of the Ohio (modern-day Pittsburgh), occurred at the hands of colonial and Indian fighters led by a young Virginia officer named George Washington.

Uniquely in the history of the world, Americans in the late eighteenth century constituted themselves as a people and as a nation in a series of epic and self-conscious acts of democratic self-invention. In 1776, thirteen British North American colonies renounced their common parent and created what would later become the world's mightiest power.

Reid interrupted. "What kind of jokes are we talking about?" We all looked at each other, not sure what to say. Reid tried again, looking at his notes. "It says here, 'Franken made jokes about the Holocaust.' What does that mean?" Diane handed our poll to Harry and pointed to the joke we had tested: "I think a bad Hanukkah gift for Anne Frank would have been a drum set."*

To have a sexual history did not only imply one had made love to a succession of people, it also suggested one had either rejected or been rejected by these same bedroom companions.