Quotes About History

This was the year in which Churchill became Churchill, the cigar-smoking bulldog we all think we know, when he made his greatest speeches and showed the world what courage and leadership looked like.

People were encouraged to wear their gas masks for thirty minutes a day, so that they would grow accustomed to their use. Children took part in gas-attack drills. "All the little children of five have Mickey Mouse gas-masks," wrote Diana Cooper in her diary. "They love putting them on for drill and at once start trying to kiss each other, then they march into their shelter singing: 'There'll always be an England.

After one raid set London's Natural History Museum on fire, water from firemen's hoses caused seeds in its collection to germinate, among them those from an ancient Persian silk tree, or mimosa—Albizia julibrissin. The seeds were said to be 147 years old.

Hunt was the janissary of a dead vernacular.

Look here, old fellow, do you realize this has been the greatest meeting of artists since the fifteenth century?

But no matter how far Germany advanced or how much more territory it seized, Hitler would not prevail. The might of the British Empire—"nay, in a certain sense, the whole English-speaking world"—was on his trail, "bearing with them the swords of justice.

Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duty and so bear ourselves that if the British Commonwealth and Empire lasts for a thousand years, men will still say, 'This was their finest hour.

I came into the world very young, in an age that was very old.

In 1945 I help liberate Berlin. I was six years in Red Army," Rogov said, his eyes gleaming with the memory.

We do to our children what was done to us.

Silence ensures that history repeats itself.

Remember not all Germans were Nazis.

We have graft today. A hundred years ago we had graft. We probably have more today than we had a hundred years ago. For three generations now people have been following reformers, fighting all sort of graft.—And what has it brought them, sweetheart? Not a damn thing, except more graft than when they started

It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.

I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be

World War I was the most colossal, murderous, mismanaged butchery that has ever taken place on earth. Any writer who said otherwise lied, So the writers either wrote propaganda, shut up, or fought.

Perhaps wars weren't won anymore. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Prose is architecture and the Baroque age is over.

There are the two curses of Spain, the bulls and the priests.

But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there.

it wasn't by accident that the Gettysburg address was so short.

I'm fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet.

We're no kin," Thomas Hudson said. "We just used to live in the same town and make some of the same mistakes.