Quotes About History

After leaving the Arts Council in 2009, he pointed out that, in the official portraits of past Council chairmen, John Maynard Keynes was the only one smiling. That was because Keynes died before ever having to chair a Council meeting.25

It would drive a man mad to apprehend the whole tragedy, to know every effect and consequence, to know the names of every good man and woman, every genius and every saint, who was never born because their lineage petered out there on that rise at Franklin.

We know how the people of Argentina ruined their country. We know how the people of Venezuela ruined their country. Few Americans know much about the history of Argentina or Venezuela. But if they wish to know how the people of the USA are ruining their own country, all they have to do is look around themselves, including, in most cases, looking in the mirror.

Barcelona has always been more a city of capital and labor than of nobility and commoners; its democratic roots are old and run very deep. Its medieval charter of citizens' rights, the Usatges, grew from a nucleus which antedated the Magna Carta by more than a hundred years. Its government, the Consell de Cent (Council of One Hundred), had been the oldest protodemocratic political body in Spain.

If Australia had not been settled as a prison and built by convict labor, it would have been colonized by other means; that was foreordained from the moment of Cook's landing at Botany Bay in 1770. But it would have taken half a century longer, for Georgian Britain would have found it exceptionally difficult to find settlers crazy or needy enough to go there of their own free will.

A young country does not serve as the pad on which England drew its sketches for the immense Gulags of the twentieth century without acquiring a few marks and scars.

Landscape is to American painting what sex and psychoanalysis are to the American novel.

Zeeland coastal towns of Flushing and Sluys against the Spanish, to

The inner meaning of history . . . involves speculation and an attempt to get at the truth, subtle explanation of the causes and origins of existing things, and deep knowledge of the how and why of events. (History,) therefore, is firmly rooted in philosophy. It deserves to be accounted a branch of (philosophy).

History is nothing but the lies we tell about our ancestors

contrast with, say, Whig historians, such as Macaulay in nineteenth-century England, is striking. The Arab historians had no belief in the progress of humanity. Instead they waited for God to declare the End of Time.

The professor counsels against retrospective history, assuming that particular pieces contributed to an outcome.

But the cable cars did not last long. They had disappeared from the streets of most cities by 1900 and from Chicago by 1906, and they remain to this day only in the single city of San Francisco, where they are primarily a tourist attraction.

The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.

The economic revolution of 1870 to 1970 was unique in human history, unrepeatable because so many of its achievements could happen only once.

both the Great Depression and World War II directly contributed to the Great Leap.

The most important unmeasured benefit of all, the extension of life expectancy, occurred much more rapidly from 1890 to 1950 than afterward.

Deborah's song in Judges 5. Then we come to

Had there been no Bible, there would be no America as we know it.

Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king. – Matthew 2:1

La Belle Aurore. The Germans wore gray; she wore blue.

The universe was the application, running now for 13.9 billion years, leading up to this moment

To a European, a hundred miles is a big journey; to an American, a hundred years is a long time.

The heart never forgets, never gives up, the territory marked off for those who came before.