Quotes About History

At noon on December 14, 1780, Alexander Hamilton, twenty-five, wed Elizabeth Schuyler, twenty-three, in the southeast parlor of the Schuyler mansion.

For Rockefeller, the onset of the disease coincided with his breakdown of the early 1890s.

Then, on September 1, 1802, Callender broke a story that he had learned about in jail and that was to reverberate down through American history: Jefferson's scandalous romance with Sally Hemings: "It is well known that the man whom it delighteth the people to honor, keeps and for many years has kept, as his concubine, one of his slaves. Her name is Sally. . . . By this wench Sally, our President has had several children.

it was a more auspicious time for an American banker than it had been when Peabody

Thanks to Washington and Hamilton, the American economy flourished; thanks to Adams, the Quasi-War with France had receded to a memory. Inheriting domestic prosperity and international peace, Jefferson benefited from exceptional good fortune as America settled down for the first time since the Revolution.

In January 1803, a grand jury in Columbia County, New York, indicted Harry Croswell for seditious libel against President Jefferson.

Delenda est Carthago: Carthage must be destroyed and obliterated.

I want to see Hamilton.

Meanwhile, the secretive Senate met upstairs in a chamber without a spectator section. For the first five years, senators conducted their business behind closed doors.

a striking example of political gaucheness, Adams then nominated Washington to command the new army before he had a chance to register an opinion. On July 3, the Senate hastily approved the choice.

In April 1803, President Jefferson reached the zenith of his popularity with the Louisiana Purchase. For a mere pittance of fifteen million dollars, the United States acquired 828,000 square miles between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, doubling American territory

On March 4, 1793, George Washington was sworn in for his second term as president

there will never be another bank as powerful, mysterious, or opulent as the old House of Morgan.

With an exalted sense of his place in history, he viewed himself as a potential savior of the republic. He once told a friend, "Perhaps my sensibility is the effect of an exaggerated estimate of my services to the U[nited] States, but on such a subject every man will judge for himself.

Yet Big Bill never entirely lost touch with his Rockefeller family.

United Colonies of America.

That, I decided, was what it meant to be a slave: your past didn't matter, in the present you were invisible and you had no claim on the future.

History cannot be unwritten or written in the subjunctive, and the wholesale application of late twentieth-century values distorts the past and makes it less comprehensible.

The past is fractal premonition, infinite to the eye but nothing to be built on . . .

Indeed, in a strange coincidence, we are living in the only era in the history of the universe when the presence of the dark energy permeating empty space is likely to be detectable. It is true that this era is several hundred billion years long, but in an eternally expanding universe it represents the mere blink of a cosmic eye.

A god who can create the laws of nature can presumably also circumvent them at will. Although why they would have been circumvented so liberally thousands of years ago, before the invention of modern communication instruments that could have recorded them, and not today, is still something to wonder about.

The republic they fashioned was a fine mix of parity and ruthlessness. On the one hand, it was the site of the world's first democratic parliament, the Althing, established in 930; on the other, those first democrats used to salt the heads of their enemies and carry them around to show off to each other.

At best, Henry had only slowed an inevitable, history-shaping pandemic. Governments would fall. Economies would collapse. Wars would arise. Why did we think that our own modern era was immune to the assault of humanity's most cunning and relentless enemy, the microbe?

There is no question that a belief system can have positive, transformative effects on people's lives. Many current and former Scientologists have attested to the value of their training and the insight they derived from their study of the religion. They have the right to believe whatever they choose. But it is a different matter to use the protections afforded a religion by the First Amendment to falsify history, to propagate forgeries, and to cover up human-rights abuses.