Quotes About History

we will hope that future historians will explain the morbid symptoms of present-day society as the childhood ailments of an aspiring humanity

That is why the study of history is so important. History is not destiny; it describes the past but does not decide the future. Yet it is a constant reminder of tragedies...and a warning against repeating them. Human beings can learn from experience. And therein lies hope.

Man's real genius and knowledge remains preserved in books

The freest people, like the freest man, is always in danger of re-lapsing into servitude. Wars are almost always fatal to Republics. They create tyrants, and consolidate their power.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

We are losing our common vocabulary, built over thousands of years to help and delight and instruct us, for the sake of what we take to be the new technology's virtues.

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

Histories, chronologies and almanacs offer us the illusion of progress, even though, over and over again, we are given proof that there is no such thing.

the point, the essential quality of the act of reading, now and always, is that it tends to no foreseeable end, to no conclusion. Every reading prolongs another, begun in some afternoon thousands of years ago and of which we know nothing; every reading projects its shadow onto the following page, lending it content and context. In this way, the story grows, layer after layer, like the skin of the society whose history this act preserves.

the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give birth to illegitimate children.

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Partly, what we are may be what we believe we once were and lost.

My Latin teacher would say, "We must be grateful that we don't know what the great books were that perished in Alexandria, because if we knew what they were, we'd be inconsolable.

Every story is a palimpsest, composed of layers of tellings and retellings, and every time we think we are parroting a well-known anecdote the words shed their feathers and sprout new ones for the occasion.

Every day, somewhere in the world, someone attempts (sometimes successfully) to stifle a book... And again and again, empires fall and literature continues.

German surgeon Johann Paul Kremer warned in his Auschwitz diary, By comparison, Dante's inferno seems almost a comedy') but as metaphor.

The charm of history and its enigmatic lesson consist in the fact that, from age to age, nothing changes and yet everything is completely different.

So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly rise and make them miserable.

History is the record of what human beings have been impelled to do by their ignorance and the enormous bumptiousness that makes them canonize their ignorance as a political or religious dogma

Only times and places, only names and ghosts.

But if you know about God, why don't you tell them?' asked the Savage indignantly. 'Why don't you give them these books about God?' 'For the same reason as we don't give them Othello: they're old; they're about God hundreds of years ago. Not about God now.' 'But God doesn't change.' 'Men do, though.' 'What difference does that make?' All the difference in the world,' said Mustapha Mond.

What I'm going to tell you now, he said, may sound incredible. But then, when you're not accustomed to history, most facts about the past DO seem incredible.

nationalism will always produce at least one war each generation. It has done in the past, and I suppose we can rely on it to do the same in the future.

Choosing Luther and Calvin instead of the spiritual reformers who were their contemporaries, Protestant Europe got the kind of theology it liked. But it also got, along with other unanticipated by-products, the Thirty Years' War, capitalism and the first rudiments of modern Germany. "If