Quotes About History

Napoleon taught ordinary people that they could make history, and convinced his followers they were taking part in an adventure, a pageant, an experiment, an epic whose splendour would draw the attention of posterity for centuries to come.

More books have been written with Napoleon in the title than there have been days since his death in 1821.

One of the chief values reading history, this is the author, is its capacity to "provoke renegade thoughts".

Rule one on page one of the book of war, is: "Do not march on Moscow." ' Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery, House of Lords, May 1962

I have beaten the Russian and Austrian army commanded by the two emperors. I am a little tired.

When Churchill was twenty, the British Empire covered more than one-fifth of the earth's land surface

The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.

This compound should be available from most good drugstores." I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently............In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule.

So tell me gentleman, tell me the time and place where it was easy to be a woman.

The words of Hannah Arendt, written to describe her own sense of statelessness and exile in the turmoil of World War Two, ring as true in the supposedly new reality of the "global village" today as the day they were written. "Contemporary history," Arendt wrote, "has created a new kind of human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes and internment camps by their friends."22

Our history is a material history, not just a succession of thoughts or speech acts.

In September 1939, Krzys Szczerba was killed as he walked in a marching column of refugees along a muddy farm road in western Poland. In September 1939, Germany was unstoppable, and Russia shared in the spoils of Polish conquest. Nobody needed Polish boys. Too bad for Poland, Too bad for boys like me. This was just one of the things in history that gave us Polish boys sleepy bags under our watchful eyes. We see everything. It is our job to pay attention to details.

History will show that patient boys with a sense of humor, who can dance, tend to have more opportunities to participate in the evolution of the species than boys who give up and mope quietly on the sidelines

I read somewhere that human beings are genetically predisposed to record history.

I didn't like seeing books damaged. I'd seen enough burned-out schoolhouses and libraries in my first life.

It is the history of the end of the world. All real histories will be about everything, and they will stretch to the end of the world.

Had (President) Kennedy turned to his advisers and wailed, "What can we beat the Russians at?" and if someone had cried "Backgammon!" at that point, Apollo would never have happened.

I can barely remember what I wrote yesterday, let alone 10 years ago.

The relationship of black Americans to Obama is sociologically riveting.

According to Carl Sagan: "Maxwell's equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

Countries rise to power and then fall into triviality.

The Bow Street Runners are almost the sole effective policing institution

Langrage was basically shards of cast or wrought iron, jagged-edged, parcelled up much like chain, used in the smaller bore cannon where chain was impractical; it had become much less popular in recent years, probably as much through fashion as logical argument.

The War To End All Wars - Book One - Falling Into Battle Andrew Wareham