Quotes About History

The Sumerians plotted the movements of the five planets they could see – Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn – and named a day after each. They then named one day after the Moon and another after the Sun, giving them a seven-day week.

It took nearly ten thousand years from the first attempts at agriculture for the world's population to reach a billion. Now we are adding extra people at a billion every dozen years.

What drives history is the human ambition to alter one's condition to match one's hopes.'3

In 1799 Princess Louisa of Prussia wrote to Jenner asking for 'vaccine' matter (the word comes from the Latin for 'cow'),

In this, the people living in the Near East were especially fortunate. There are fifty-six edible grasses growing wild in the world – cereals like wheat, barley, corn and rice. Of those, no fewer than thirty-two grew on the hills and plains of the Fertile Crescent of today's southern Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Israel and Iraq, compared with just four varieties apiece in Africa and America, and only one native variety, oats, in Western Europe.

Events – dear boy – duly forced the devaluation option into centre stage. Decade by decade, government by government, the impact of energy policy on British politics is a constant theme. One could write a useful political history which did not move beyond the dilemmas posed by energy supply.

Human groups who kept cows so as to drink their milk developed digestive systems to cope, while Asians who never did this did not.

We stand not on the shoulders of giants, but on the shoulders of our grandparents and of our great-great-great-grandparents too.

Beethoven is said, however, to have torn out the title page in protest when Napoleon crowned himself emperor, and retitled it the Eroica, dedicating it 'to the memory of a great man' – with the emphasis on memory.

She really was an excellent host, however many people her family had enslaved and murdered.

There's a weird historical link between cults and science fiction. Not only do science-fiction writers create cults, sometimes cult leaders become obsessed with science fiction.

Fun fact: the first manmade object in space was a Nazi V2 rocket in 1942. Space historians and people who like to remind you how there would be no private space industry without NASA tend to gloss over how much those goose-stepping assholes contributed to rocket technology.

What's the delimiter between pyramid and ziggurat?

It's like the old stories

Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE DEED The title to 17658 Wimbledon has had four owners since it was built. From

Almost five hundred years ago, John Wilkins, a philosopher and bishop, pushed heavily for the written language to adopt an upside-down exclamation point at the end of a sentence to indicate irony. Think of how many online feuds that could have prevented.

Eighth Earl of Spencer

More people are reading poetry now than at any time in the history of the human race.

The monarchy continued this tradition, and it migrated to America as soon as there was profit to be had.

The most successful ran a shop full of scribes turning out several dozen copies a week. These avvisi were succinct, wide ranging and remarkably well informed.

A family is a group of people who have different versions of the same experience.

the first time that Churchill dialled a telephone number himself was when he was seventy-three. 13 (It was to the speaking clock, which he thanked politely.)

On THE DECSIVE DUEL: SPITFIRE VS 109 The epic struggle between the Spitfire and the Messerschmitt 109 upon which so much of western civilization depended in the summer of 1940 has found the ideal biographer in David Isby. I write "biographer" because, like the men who flew these remarkable fighter planes, Isby sees them in almost human terms, transcending the mere mechanical. (Andrew Roberts, Author Of The Storm Of War )