Quotes About History

There is a long history of newspapers being doomed. They were doomed by radio. They were doomed by television. They were probably doomed by the telegraph way back when.

Back then, the excise tax was designed to be a luxury tax for people who owned telephones.

Henry Kissinger never wanted the 20,000 pages of his telephone transcripts made public - not while he was alive, at any rate.

Scotland almost invented the modern world. I mean, all of these televisions, telephones, penicillin, we all - all of these things were invented in Scotland.

Hubble is the most important telescope in history after Galileo's first telescope.

When the stock market crashed, Franklin Roosevelt got on the television and didn't just talk about the princes of greed. He said, 'Look, here's what happened.'

How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.

I've seen the invention of television and performed on television even before my family owned one.

Anytime a movie or television show retreats into certain American pasts, I'm both annoyed and relieved.

When a television show like 'Scandal' becomes the biggest show in recent history, suddenly advertisers and networks want to jump on that. And what it's showing is that people want to see diversity.

It's a curious thing about celebrity: being somebody who was one of the stars of one of the most popular television shows in history offers an opportunity. I look at it as an ambassadorial opportunity at times, where I can go to places and have the opportunity to do things and meet people that other people don't have.

We go through life owned by the stories we tell ourselves which are often historic and charged narratives - things we've learnt since childhood that we don't even consciously realise are going on.

There is no need to tell you that the 'Prince of Salina' is the Prince Lampedusa, my great-grandfather Giulio Fabrizio.

I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history.

History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it.

I am not a qualified historian, but rather a teller of stories from history.

The human race has been telling stories since it began.

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

The podcast 'A History of Jazz' began telling its story in February - 100 years after the recording of 'Livery Stable Blues' by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, the start of jazz as a legitimate branch of music.

When that book came out, it was like Columbus telling about America at the court of Ferdinand and Isabella.

History had its own way of explaining things. The way historians explain things is by telling a story.

An old building is like a show. You smell the soul of a building. And the building tells you how to redo it.

History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive.

The same way one tells a recipe, one tells a family history. Each one of us has our past locked inside.