Quotes About History

For at least two million years men have been reproducing and multiplying on a little automated Spaceship Earth.

If only Hitler and Mussolini could have a good game of bowls once a week at Geneva, I feel that Europe would not be as troubled as it is.

Ergot, growing millennia later on certain cultivated grains, seems to have coincided in its arrival on the human stage with the discovery by Man of agriculture.

How the proud Rajputs reconciled with the idea of offering their daughters to Muslims, has not been explained. Was it a political compulsion only? Or were the Mughals, as a martial race admitted in their caste as the kshatriyas? But it was all along oneway traffic and no Mughal princess is recorded to have been married to a Rajput.

History. Language. Passion. Custom. All these things determine what men say, think, and do. These are the hidden puppet-strings from which all men hang.

It is often hard for an irreligious age to recognize that religion has in fact been capable of dividing men as effectually as political doctrine or economic status, but unless the fact is recognized the history of the Middle Ages will remain a meaningless labyrinth

The doctrine of vocation or calling gained currency as men began to take time and history seriously. If the goal of the Christian life is a neoplatonic flight from this world, then pietism has effectively undermined the doctrine of non-ecclesiastical callings. To speak of having a calling is usually to speak of the clergy and clerical office.

The first book I opened looked promising—Mummies and Their Secrets by Sir Lynn N. Bandage.

Northern India like Seleucus and Sikander (Alexander). Even

Over the time, it has been renamed several times-Pushpur, Pushpnagar, Kusumpur, Patliputra and now it is called Patna.

We are never completely contemporaneous with our present. History advances in disguise; it appears on stage wearing a mask of the preceding scene, and we tend to lose the meaning of the play.

the redeeming Cross was stained with blood. Not that of the missionaries. Only that of indigenous peoples.

People often ask: Where was God in the Holocaust? It is the wrong question. The real question: Where was man?

Like all cities, Beirut has many layers, and I had been familiar with one or two. What I was introduced to that day with Ali and Kamal was the Beirut of its people. You take different groups, put them on top of each other, simmer for a thousand years, keep adding more and more strange tribes, simmer for another few thousand years, salt and pepper with religion, and what you get is a delightful mess of a stew that still tastes delectable and exotic, no matter how many times you partake of it.

Almost everything that men have said best has been said in Greek.

We, like most humans, consider history a lesson on a blackboard that can be sponged off.

But to paraphrase the ever-paraphraseable Freud, who said something to the effect that when you speak about the past you lie with every breath you take, I will say this: When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.

I can dig out the old chestnut from George Santayana, that "those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," but it serves no purpose. It's a hopelessly optimistic quote. We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups).

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not. It is inevitable; just ask Nietzsche (eternal return) or Hegel (history repeats itself) or James McCourt (history repeats itself like hiccups). Beirutis

We are condemned to repeat the past whether we remember it or not.

Every Beiruti of a certain age has learned that on leaving for a walk you should never be too sure of returning home, not only because something might happen to you personally, but also because your home might cease to exist.

Beirut has survived for thousands and thousands of years by spreading her beautiful legs for every army within smelling distance.

Mark Twain's quote: "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

When you write about the past, you lie with each letter, with every grapheme, including the goddamn comma.