Quotes About History

History is filled with fictional people.

All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes -all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the earth into a graveyard, into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its rememberance. Then we become the grave diggers.

You don't need a time machine if you know how to remember.

For example, at the fall of Rome there was very extensive slavery everywhere in Europe; by the time of the "Renaissance" it was long gone.

Although many sociologists still echo Max Weber's (1864–1920) claim that capitalism originated in the Protestant Reformation, capitalism actually originated in the "depths" of the "Dark Ages.

An additional indication of economic growth in ancient Greece comes from the major increases in the average size of Greek houses: in the eighth century BC it was 53 square meters; by the sixth century BC it had grown to 122 square meters; and by the fifth century BC it was 325 square meters.54

More recently, faculty at the University of Texas condemned "Western Civilization" courses as inherently right wing, and Yale even returned a $20 million contribution rather than reinstate the course.

IN WHAT CAME TO BE KNOWN as his farewell address, Muhammad is said to have told his followers: "I was ordered to fight all men until they say 'There is no god but Allah.'"1 This is entirely consistent with the Qur'an (9:5) : "[S]lay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them [captive], and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush." In this spirit, Muhammad's heirs set out to conquer the world.

It is well known that the Chinese had gunpowder by the thirteenth century and even cast a few cannons. But when Western voyagers reached China in the sixteenth century the Chinese lacked both artillery and firearms, whereas the Europeans had an abundance of both.

Nevertheless, the more odious restrictions – such as being confined at night to ghettos, or even being expelled from a nation – were placed upon them by the state, not the Roman Catholic Church.

As for the fall of the Spanish Empire, ironically, perhaps no monarchs in history were more conscientious, honest, or hardworking than Charles V and his son Philip II. Between them they carefully built the Spanish Empire and ruled it for more than eighty years. Nearly every day they rose early and worked diligently at administering this sprawling entity. Had they been wastrels or playboys, they might have done much less damage to the economies in their charge.

That the Catholic Church finally thrives in Latin America could be considered as partly a gift from Martin Luther.

The truth is that not only did Christianity not impede the rise of science; it was essential to it, which is why science arose only in the Christian West!

When William the Conqueror had the Domesday Book compiled in 1086, this forerunner of the modern census reported at least 6,500 water-powered mills operating in England, or one for about every fifty families.

When the Bishop of Gloucester systematically tested Church of England diocesan clergy in 1551, of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, and 27 did not know the author of the Lord's Prayer.

Unfortunately, there is no contemporary history of Rome prior to about 200 BC, when centuries of oral traditions were first committed to writing.

The only common feature of the three successful Reformations was their rejection of papal authority; otherwise they were quite at odds.

As the historian Edward Grant explained, 'It is indisputable that modern science emerged in the seventeenth century in Western Europe and nowhere else'. ... The crucial question is: Why? My answer to this question is as brief as it is unoriginal: Christianity depicted God as a rational, responsive, dependable, and omnipotent being and the universe as his personal creation, thus having a rational, lawful, stable structure, awaiting human comprehension.

In addition, local authorities were ordered to seize each Christian man, to pluck out his beard and to tattoo a black mark on his shoulder. When few Christians defected in response to these measures, the Kh?n then ordered that all Christian men be castrated and have one eye put out—which caused many deaths in this era before antibiotics, but did lead to many conversions.37

Christianity became a European faith because Europe was the only "continent where it was not destroyed."44

the Romans knew of the watermill but made nearly no use of it, continuing to rely on muscle power to grind their flour.20 The Ottoman Empire prohibited the mechanical clock, and so did the Chinese.

As the distinguished medievalist Warren Hollister (1930–1997) put it in his presidential address to the Pacific Historical Association, "to my mind, anyone who believes that the era that witnessed the building of Chartres Cathedral and the invention of parliament and the university was 'dark' must be mentally retarded—or at best, deeply, deeply, ignorant."60

Sad to say, it is no surprise that the massacre of Antioch is barely reported in many recent Western histories of the Crusades. Steven Runciman gave it eight lines, 30 Hans Eberhard Mayer gave it one, 31 and Christopher Tyerman, who devoted several pages to lurid details of the massacre of Jerusalem during the First Crusade, dismissed the massacre of Antioch in four words.32

This partly reflects the Balkanization of history – that scholars attend only to their special time and place. But, for the most part, it reflects that far too many scholars rely on the received wisdom, even on matters central to their subject.