Quotes About History

Along with a chamber pot and tersorium, of course." "What's a tersorium?" Boyd thought at this AI. "A sponge on a stick," replied Sage helpfully. "Which Roman's used to wipe their anuses after defecation.

Thomas Babington Macaulay,

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That's why they call it the present. —Unknown "The

Delaware Aqueduct, had been completed in 1945, and ran

Yesterday is history. Tomorrow is a mystery. But today is a gift. That's why they call it the present. —Unknown

The longest tunnel ever constructed, the Delaware Aqueduct, had been completed in 1945, and ran eighty-five miles through solid rock, delivering half of the water used in New York City each day.

Our greatest emperor, Caesar, is only linked to a salad. And he didn't even invent it.

779 AUC (Ab Urbe Condita)

It is a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." —The White Queen, Alice in Wonderland

Neville Chamberlain, Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, in a letter.

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

When he (Walter Cronkite) drank, he had an appetite for both history and political bullshit.

History will remember the Superdome debacle—caused by the dearth of evacuation buses—as "Nagin's Folly," mayoral incompetence of the first order.

If there is an abiding theme in The Pursuit of Happiness it is the idea that you come into the world already shaped by other people's past histories. How you then grapple with everything life throws in your path—and how your own sense of ethics dictates so much about your dealings with life's larger questions—determines so much. "Character

Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.

The history of the failure of war can almost be summed up in two words: too late.

A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time. But a country that believes it has only done wrong, or done such a terrible, unalleviated amount of wrong in the past, is likely to become a country that is inclined to doubt its ability to ever do any good in the future.

Europeans have been deflating the language of anti-fascism ahead of a time when they might need it.

Only Europeans and their descendants remember guilt. So only Europeans and their descendants have continuously to atone for it.

There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here. For of course people only think that they would have acted better in history because they know how history ended up. People in history didn't – and don't – have that luxury. They made good or bad choices in the times and places they were in, given the situations and shibboleths that they found themselves with.

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible. The less that was successfully said, the greater the relief and acclaim. No attempt to address any idea, history or fact was able to pass without first being put through the pit-stop of the modern academy. No generality could be attempted and no specific could be uttered.

The further Fascism receded into history and the fewer visible fascists there were on display, the more self-proclaimed anti-fascists needed fascism to retain any semblance of political virtue or purpose. It proved politically useful to describe as fascist people who were not Fascists , just as it proved politically useful to describe as racist people who were not racists.

They are an American Delegation who are doing a tour of the region to apologize for the crusades', said Arafat. Then he, and his guest, burst out laughing. They both knew that America had little or no involvement in the wars of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. But Arafat, at any rate, was happy to indulge the affliction of anyone who believed they had and use it to his own political advantage.

This is the process by which everything from the past can be picked over, picked apart, and eventually destroyed. It can find no way of building. It can only find a way of endlessly pulling apart. So a novel by Jane Austen is taken apart until a delicate work of fiction is turned instead into nothing more than another piece of guilty residue from a discredited civilization. What has been achieved in this? Nothing but a process of destruction.