Quotes About History

established views have frequently emerged not through a process of faultless reasoning, but through centuries of intellectual muddle. There may be no good reason for things to be the way they are.

Rather than a tale of greed, the history of luxury could more accurately be read as a record of emotional trauma. It is the legacy of those who have felt pressured by the disdain of others to add an extraordinary amount to their bare selves in order to signal that they too may lay a claim to love.

Applied to the news , having perspective involves an ability to compare an apparently traumatic event in the present with the experiences of humanity across the whole of its history – in order to work out what level of attention and fear it should fairly demand. With perspective in mind, we soon realize that – contrary to what the news suggests – hardly anything is totally novel, few things are truly amazing and very little is absolutely terrible.

We seem incapable of looking at buildings or pieces of furniture without tying them to the historical and personal circumstances of our viewing; as a result, architectural and decorative styles become, for us, emotional souvenirs of the moments and settings in which we came across them.

It is striking how much more seriously we are likely to be taken after we have been dead a few centuries.

The prestige of the news is founded on the unstated assumption that our lives are forever poised on the verge of critical transformation thanks to the two driving forces of modern history: politics and technology.

It was not by mere coincidence that sex so disturbed us for thousands of years: repressive religious dictates and social taboos grew out of aspects of our nature that cannot now just be wished away.

The only way to defend language is to attack it....' - Proust. Every good writer in history had, in order to ensure adequate expression, broken a range of rules laid down by previous writers.

If a traveller was to feel personally involved with (rather than guiltily obedient towards) 'the walls and ceilings of the church decorated with nineteenth-century frescoes and paintings...', he or she would have to be able to connect these facts--as boring as a fly--with one of the large, blunt questions to which genuine curiosity must be anchored.

Its particular interest for Ian, however, lay in its thesis about the history of the Dutch relationship to windmills, for it emphasized that these early industrial objects had originally been felt to have all the pylons' threateningly alien qualities, rather than the air of enchantment and playfulness now routinely associated with them. They had been denounced from pulpits and occasionally burnt to the ground by suspicious villagers.

L'Africain a été le premier homme sur la Terre, les autres races ne sont venues qu'après. Tous les hommes sont donc des immigrés, sauf les Africains qui sont chez eux ici-bas.

Lorsque les Blancs sont venus en Afrique, nous avions la terre et ils avaient la Bible. Ils nous ont appris à prier les yeux fermés: lorsque nous les avons ouverts, les Blancs avaient la terre et nous la Bible.

History nowadays is not a matter of conviction. It's a performance. It's entertainment. And if it isn't, make it so.

The prime minister did not wholly believe in the past or in any lessons that might be drawn from it.

It's not so much lest we forget, as lest we remember.

It could be a Michael Powell film or a page from the diaries of Denton Welch...the field would make a good Brideshead-like beginning for a film: as it is now and as it was then...'There is nothing I would want to alter or improve. Unattended to, disregarded (though it's grade 1 listed) it is just as the past should be.

there are a few houses on the street left in their original trim, today's newcomers seldom moving in until they have ripped the guts out of these decent Victorian villas to turn them into models of white and modish minimalism.

La storia è il commento alle varie e continue incapacità degli uomini.

Before Cook's arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.

It is not just the history of the Hawaiian islands but the significance of the ordinary people whose lives - many quite extraordinary - make up that history.

population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it had plummeted to fewer than sixty thousand.

Hawai'i became only the second sovereign nation to join the United States. But unlike the Republic of Texas, where a public referendum was held, no one asked the thirty-one thousand native Hawaiians whether they wished to give up their country. Twenty-nine thousand of them signed a petition of protest, which was submitted to Congress and politely ignored.

Before Cook's arrival the native population of Hawai'i was more than a quarter of a million people; a hundred years later, it

If you want your destiny to be greater than your history, give no credence to history and all credence to possibility.