Quotes About History

Aboard the Belgica, off Antarctica, May 20, 1898: Explorer Frederick Cook

A desire for a small government is nothing new, of course. At the end of the nineteenth century, a U.S. government official proposed closing the office of patents. Everything of importance had already been invented, he said.

If one day equaled the age of the universe, all of recorded history would be no more than ten seconds.

Worms appeared on Earth more than six hundred million years ago. They were soft, small-bodied creatures that fed on nutrients at the bottom of the sea. But they were different from anything that had come before because they had heads with mouths and primitive brains. Also new were there guts and organs, arteries and veins. Today there are so many worms in the world that even if every other substance were to disappear from Earth the shape of our planet would still be outlined by them.

Mark Twain fell in love with his wife after he saw her picture painted on an ivory miniature the size of a fingernail.

Sinclair was even more impassioned. He owned large estates in Caithness and in the 1790s he compiled his detailed Statistical Account of Scotland, a compendium of information on geography, economy and society and history that would eventually grow to twenty-one volumes. Putting the new theories

famously, Scots are very interested in their past, real or invented, but who else is?

We cannot erase the past, but we can adjust our present to the lessons history teaches. Instead of denying or condemning old offenses, we should seek to understand them. We must not allow injustices to recur out of ignorance or wishful thinking.

The Shallow Faith of the Founding Fathers The founding fathers were politicians and philosophers, churchmen and doubters. They were well acquainted with history, theology,

War tore the guts out of the British empire, weakening it in resources and morale. The first major loss was Ireland.

Ruth Kluger's Landscapes of Memory: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered.

The third explanation for 1918's lethality is that the flu virus triggered an overreactive immune response that turned the body against itself.

Today, influenza kills fewer than 0.1 percent of those who catch it. Nearly everyone recovers. In the 1918 pandemic most still recovered, but the death rate was twenty-five times greater. So many died in the U.S. that the average life expectancy in 1918 fell from fifty-one to thirty-nine years.

The history of the 1918 influenza pandemic is depressing reading. It's like watching a horror movie that you have seen before. You know who the killer is, but you can't jump in and save the victim.

The rules of war, then, have always changed as a reaction to the conflict that's just been fought.

Courses in historiography confront students with the possibility that history, like literature, is about stories and that it necessarily involves philosophical questions, such as how we can actually come to know things.

Although history is concerned with the past, it is conducted in the present.

The sad thing about any business I suppose, but in mine you see it particularly, is that you're always asked to do what you've already done.

By the end of 2012, the price of gold reached $1,675 per ounce, and $1 of gold bullion purchased in 1802 was worth $86.40 at the end of 2012, while the price level itself increased by a factor of 19.12.

I wanted to make sure that this be the first scientific and technology revolution in history in which the public thoroughly discussed all the potential benefits and all the potential harms, in advance of the technology coming online and running its course.

The well-being of the biosphere is measured over millennia of history and necessitates a human consciousness that can reflect and project along a similar time table.

The global financial collapse exposed the longstanding myth that commercial exchange is a primary institution. There are no examples in history where people created commercial markets and exchange before creating a culture.

Every schoolboy knows it.

A fellow undergraduate student, majoring in history, as was I, who didn't care about the advanced aerodynamic principles of things like boundary layer separation during stalls and exactly why you might get detonation within the cylinders of the engine if the mixture was grossly improperly adjusted for a given power setting at a given altitude.