Quotes About History

The frequent claims that empty churches and low levels of religious activity in Europe today reflect a steep decline in piety are wrong—it was always thus.

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.

Nevertheless, this too is a myth. The Catholic Church actually thrives on Protestant competition and is far more successful and effective when forced to confront it.

The reason so many innovations and inventions were abandoned or even outlawed in China had to do with Confucian opposition to change on grounds that the past was greatly superior.

In fact, when the Egyptians would not export papyrus, parchment (made from treated animal skins) was invented in Pergamum. The word parchment derives from the Latin "Pergamena charta," or "paper of Pergamum.

DURING THE SUMMER OF THE year 64, the emperor Nero sometimes lit up his garden at night by setting fire to a few fully conscious Christians who had been covered with wax and then impaled high on poles forced up their rectums. Nero also had Christians killed by wild animals in the arena, and he even crucified a few.

capitalism was a very Catholic invention: it first appeared in the great monastic estates, way back in the ninth century.

Property is insecure. In this one phrase the whole history of Asia is contained.

Russians like the rest of us prefer to believe that their history has progressed in a straight and positive line. They explain away troubling events such as brutal reigns of Ivan the Terrible or Stalin as necessary stages on the path to greatness.

Russia is a country with unpredictable past.

In Egypt: Under no conditions, under threat of death could anyone kill a cat. People were exceuted for even killing a cat accidentally. And when a cat died, the whole family, and probably their closest friends, went into mourning, the measure of their personal loss signalled by their shaving off their eyebrows.

so that age and subsequent generation always go on destroying and spoiling what went before:

And this is when I knew I was black for real. This is when I knew black was a city whose walls were constantly under siege....

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place with curators in museums; others we take for walks.

An honest bookstore would post the following sign above its "self-help" section: "For true self-help, please visit our philosophy, literature, history, and science sections, find yourself a good book, read it, and think about it.

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [...] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling...and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old.

Every subject has its canonical history, usually sold to beginners as a sequence of revolutionary vignettes, each associated with a 'pioneer'.

The only way to measure our progress is to read about what this country used to be.

To think creatively, to struggle with an opaque text or confounding idea, to seek connections between periods of history or disciplines of thought, and to search for the precise word or the right rhythm for a single sentence—these are human actions every bit as worthy as the wielding of a hammer, the manipulation of a surgical scalpel, or the making of a courtroom argument.

As historians, we have to remind ourselves that yesterday was once tomorrow.

While the Germans were unleashing a race war in the west of Poland, the Soviets imported class war to the east in the Red Army's baggage train.

Darkie! Sambo! You must think we're dumb. Are we dumb? From the slaveships to world wars, to the underground and the hospitals, it's always been about the labour, never about the living. Cheap muscles and blood to build you an empire.

Nobody who is alert to beauty, therefore, is without the concept of redemption—of a final transcendence of mortal disorder into a 'kingdom of ends'. In an age of declining faith art bears enduring witness to the spiritual hunger and immortal longings of our species. Hence aesthetic education matters more today than at any previous period in history.

Sanctions make a substantial contribution to power based on privation, and they have never hurt a single despot in the whole history of their use.