Quotes About History

One morning during Lent in 415, Hypatia climbed into her chariot, some say outside her residence, some say on a street intending to ride home. Several hundred of Cyril's stooges, Christian monks from a desert monastery, swooped upon her, beat her, and dragged her to a church. Inside the church they stripped her naked and peeled away her flesh with either sharpened tiles or broken bits of pottery.

It all began when the Beagle's previous captain, Pringle Stokes, shot himself in the head and, after the bullet didn't kill him, died of gangrene.

In fact, the first clock to record hours of equal length wasn't invented until the 1330s. Before that, daylight, however long, had been divided into twelve equal intervals, which meant that an "hour" might be more than twice as long in June as in December (in London, for example, it varied from 38 to 82 of today's minutes).

Cardano worked at a time when mystical incantation was more valued than mathematical calculation.

Little is known about Boyle's mother, other than that she was married at seventeen and proceeded to bear fifteen children in the next twenty-three years, then dropped dead of consumption, which by then must have come as a relief.

In 1794, Lavoisier was arrested with the rest of the association and quickly sentenced to death. Ever the dedicated scientist, he requested time to complete some of his research so that it would be available to posterity. To that the presiding judge famously replied, "The republic has no need of scientists.

The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s."10 What had those Ph.D.'s been taught to think in their schools and universities—and where did such ideas come from?

Nazism in politics was a form of statism. In principle, it did not represent a new approach to government; it was a continuation of the political absolutism—the absolute monarchies, the oligarchies, the theocracies, the random tyrannies—which has characterized most of human history.

We dare not brush aside unexplained a horror such as Nazism. If we are to avoid a fate like that of Germany, we must find out what made such a fate possible. We must find out what, at root, is required to turn a country, Germany or any other, into a Nazi dictatorship; and then we must uproot that root. We

The Nazi] death camps," notes a writer in The New York Times, "were conceived, built and often administered by Ph.D.'s.

Hegel would not have been possible but for Kant, who would not have been possible but for Plato. These three, more than any others, are the intellectual builders of Auschwitz.

In many respects, the West has not recovered from the Middle Ages.

According to the Progressives, education is to be not subject-centered, but child-centered. ("We don't teach history, we teach Johnny.")

It is Kant who made possible the sudden mushrooming of the Platonic collectivism in the modern world, and especially in Germany.

Kant is the first and greatest nihilist in the history of thought. A nihilist is one who works to destroy man's mind and values as an end in itself, for the sake of the destruction.

How could a slight, five-foot-tall, two-legged animal create such sublimity and yet wreak so much havoc in so minuscule an interval of earth's history?

If the skulls of the people who have been killed in the name of God, Jesus, and Allah in religious wars and persecutions could be piled in one place, they would form an immense mountain. If we tallied the cost in human suffering for the belief in monotheism, we might not think of the other religions of the world as primitive.

Writing was a gift eagerly accepted by the ancients. Unfortunately, hiding among the neat rows of carefully incised script was an unwelcome demon—misogyny. In trying to understand what went wrong between the sexes, these two cultures are at the pivot of history.

The occurrence of monotheism, codified law, and the alphabet all at the same moment in history cannot have been coincidental…. The abstractness of all three innovations were mutually reinforcing. —Robert Logan

The proposition that the alphabet has hindered women's aspirations and accomplishments seems, at first glance, to be antithetical to historical facts.

there are more biographies of Jesus than of any other human—one hundred thousand biographies in English alone.4

It is better to imitate ancient than modern work.

I've been going to the library, looking up our history. There's a ton of it in anthropology books, a ton of it, Ruth. We haven't always been hated. Why didn't we grow up knowing that?

The 1960s epidemic of German measles is unique in the history of infectious diseases for doing the opposite. German measles helped to lift the repression of a sexually deviant practice—namely, abortion—and transform it into an honorable one.