Quotes About History

We are old-timers,each of us holds a locked razor.

on Boylston Street, a commercial photographshows Hiroshima boiling.

Two months after marching through Boston,half the regiment was dead;at the dedication,William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.Their monument sticks like a fishbonein the city's throat.Its Colonel is as leanas a compass-needle.He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,a greyhound's gentle tautness;he seems to wince at pleasure,and suffocate for privacy.

We are all old-timers, each of us holds a locked razor.

History has to live with what was here, clutching and close to fumbling all we had - it is so dull and gruesome how we die, unlike writing, life never finishes.

History may be read as the story of the magnificent rearguard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it.

No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past." — British Major Ronald Balfour of the Monuments Men

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future. Art

We do not want to destroy unnecessarily what men spent so much time and care and skill in making… [for] these examples of craftsmanship tell us so much about our ancestors.…

Posey remembered a story he had heard other soldiers telling about Patton's days commanding U.S. Seventh Army in Sicily in 1943. General Patton, upon seeing the Roman ruins at Agrigento, remarked to a local expert, "Seventh Army didn't cause that destruction, did it, sir?" The man replied, "No sir, that happened in the last war." "What war was that?" "The Second Punic War."5

The inventory listed every work of art in the Western world—France, the Netherlands, Britain, and even the United States (which Kümmel said possessed nine such works)—that rightly belonged to Germany. Under Hitler's definition, this included every work taken from Germany since 1500, every work by any artist of German or Austrian descent, every work commissioned or completed in Germany, and every work deemed to have been executed in a Germanic style. The

It marked the first time an army fought a war while comprehensively attempting to mitigate cultural damage, and it was performed without adequate transportation, supplies, personnel, or historical precedent.

ancestors.… If these things are lost or broken or destroyed, we lose a valuable part of our knowledge about our forefathers. No age lives entirely alone; every civilisation is formed not merely by its own achievements but by what it has inherited from the past. If these things are destroyed, we have lost a part of our past, and we shall be the poorer for it. —British Monuments Man Ronald Balfour, draft lecture for soldiers, 1944 All

That they will be sources of inspiration illuminating the past and vivifying the present; that they will fortify the spirit on which victory depends. Despite

The Führermuseum, the most spectacular art museum in history, culled from the riches of the entire world, gave that pursuit a defining rationale.

To safeguard these things will not affect the course of battles, but it will affect the relations of invading armies with those peoples and [their] governments.…

Of all the charges which have been leveled against me," he is quoted as saying in the Nuremberg Interviews, "the so-called looting of art treasures by me has caused me the most anguish.

They are expressions of faith, and they stand for man's struggle to relate himself to his past and to his God. With

Non mi sono mai reso conto di che cosa significasse combattere in un museo finché non ho messo piede in Italia. - Kesselring

how could one of the most important and unbelievable moments in art history—not to mention the history of a world war—simply become a forgotten footnote? But that's exactly what happened.

It is also a near-perfect summary of what happens in the void of war and how history is more often than not a messy combination of intention, courage, preparation, and chance. If

We must guard jealously all we have inherited from a long past, all we are capable of creating in a trying present, and all we are determined to preserve in a foreseeable future.

I wanted to come right out of my chair at the witness table and scream, You guys have been in business for over two hundred years and can't pass routine legislation. How can you be so impatient with a bunch of parliamentarians who've been at it a year after four thousand years of dictatorship?