Quotes About History

Finally, Galileo did not say "And yet it does move" as he left the courtroom. There is no contemporary record of his saying this; the claim first appears in a book about Galileo written over a century later.1

The Victorian era produced more Victorian writers than any other period in history.

Bodley's librarian Thomas Hearne responded gallantly that Wood himself was 'always looked upon in Oxford as a most egregious, illiterate, dull blockhead, a conceited impudent coxcomb'. The

While I have never been a member of any union, I was a friend of Albert Shanker, president of the American Federation of Teachers, whom I met after my history of the New York City schools was published. His successor, Sandra Feldman, was also my friend, and I am friends with her successor, Randi Weingarten, who was elected AFT president in 2008.

Thus, those who now sharply criticize the public schools speak fondly of an era when most schools were racially segregated; when public schools were not required to accept children with physical, mental, and emotional handicaps; when there were relatively few students who did not speak or read English; and when few graduated from high school and went to college.

Sometimes when you open the door to the past, what you confront is your destiny.

I think that great poetry is the most interesting and complex use of the poet's language at that point in history, and so it's even more exciting when you read a poet like Yeats, almost 100 years old now, and you think that perhaps no one can really top that.

Keep in mind, we are past the age of enlightenment. This is past reason. We are pretty deep into modern history and the decline of religion. This is when nature itself has been stripped bare of its cozy personality and we all feel homeless in our natures as well. "The Limits Of The World

Yet as a national spoken tongue, Italian, practically born yesterday, is nuovissimo

All Italian cities have ghosts, but Florence's seem to me to be always speaking. As

The Irish Economy Since 1922.

and it was the Church after 1559 which established 'Communion' as the norm. There's a nice little doctoral project awaiting someone to trace out how 'Communion' won the battle against 'Lord's Supper'; I would make a preliminary guess that it was not until 1662.

THE EXILE AND AFTER This renewed catastrophe was a key event in the history of the people of Israel. Maybe if the exile in Babylon had lasted more than half a century, the impetus to preserve and enhance a Jewish identity might have been lost, but as it was the exiles who returned were able to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem; it was reconsecrated in 516 BCE.

There is no surer basis for fanaticism than bad history, which is invariably history oversimplified.

The Catholic struggle to hold the line against Protestantism brought thirty years of misery to millions of Europeans: opinions vary, but within the German lands one modern estimate is that 40 per cent of the population met an early death through the fighting or the accompanying famine and disease, and even the most cautious reassessment of the evidence comes up with a figure of 15-20 per cent.

There is now general agreement among historians that between 1400 and 1800, between forty and fifty thousand people died in Europe and colonial north America on charges of witchcraft

Henry VII's victory at Bosworth Field was one of the most astonishing political reverses in English history, the culmination of long-term plotting spearheaded by his formidable mother, Lady Margaret Beaufort, the most successful politician in fifteenth-century England.

I think I have many spenglerian moods about the country, and that some day people will look back and think 'this was a really goofy, unadmirable stupid time.

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn't think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.

Den enes helgon har varit den andres satkärring -- på 1300-talet liksom i nutiden.

Le voyage dans l'histoire est le moyen de comprendre les systèmes de pensée qui régissent les institutions, d'en défaire l'évidence et l'assurance normative, et de desserrer ainsi les barreaux instaurés dans les consciences par les technologies disciplinaires. (p. 389)

We are torn out of our own existence and set down in the midst of the holy history of God on earth. There God dealt with us, and there he still deals with us, our needs and our sins, in judgment and grace.

It is not that God is the spectator and sharer of our present life, howsoever important that is; but rather that we are the reverent listeners and participants in God's action in the sacred story, the history of the Christ on earth.