Quotes About History

Slavery received, but the prejudice to which it has given birth remains stationary.

nothing, on the other hand, can be more impenetrable to the uninitiated than a legislation founded upon precedents.

When the English adopted the institution of the jury, they were a half-barbaric people; they have since become one of the most enlightened nations of the globe, and their attachment to the jury has seemed to increase with their enlightenment.

Thus the negro transmits the eternal mark of his ignominy to all his descendants; and although the law may abolish slavery, God alone can obliterate the traces of its existence.

December, 1865, of the celebrated 13th article or amendment of the Constitution, which declared that neither slavery nor involuntary servitude—except as a punishment for crime—shall exist within the United States.

History, it is easily perceived, is a picture-gallery containing a host of copies and very few originals.

It must never be forgotten that religion gave birth to Anglo-American society.

Never was such a great event, with such ancient causes, so well prepared and so little foreseen.

Je hais, pour ma part, ces systèmes absolus, qui font dépendre tous les événements de l'histoire de quelques causes premières se liant les unes aux autres par une chaîne fatale, et qui suppriment, pour ainsi dire, les hommes de l'histoire du genre humain. Je les trouve étroits dans leur prétendue grandeur, et faux sous leurs airs de vérités mathématiques.

One sees that history is an art gallery where there are few originals and many copies.

The old nobility was the most irreligious class of society before 1789, and the most pious after 1793 ...

Looking back century by century to remotest Antiquity, I see nothing that resembles what I see before me.

Are ruins, then, already here?

America the only country in which the starting-point of a great people has been clearly observable

Distorted history boasts of bellicose glory... and seduces the souls of boys to seek mystical bliss in bloodshed and in battles.

One epoch's popular culture is another's esoterica.

Century also had shelves of obsolete printed books.

The Spanish Stairs were destroyed in the fission wars of the late twentieth century. They were rebuilt and destroyed again in the war of the World Restoration in the twenty-first century.

Observe this fact: in the history of mankind, every ruler who has lacked personal greatness has been forced to compensate for the deficiency by setting up the executioner at his right hand like a guardian angel

History is a novel whose author is the people

So this was all which these Pharisees and Scribes could see in the miracle of Christ's feeding the Multitude--that it had not been done according to Law! Most strange as it may seem, yet in the past history of the Church, and, perhaps, sometimes also in the present, this has been the only thing which some men have seen in the miraculous working of the Christ!

Both ignorance and the old metaphysics tend to produce these undesirable nervous effects of reversed order and so non-survival evaluation. If we use the nervous ystem in a way which is against its survival structure, we must expect non-survival. Human history is short, but already we have astonishing records of extinction.

Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with propriety, women who had enemies, women who took lovers, women who knew about the mysteries of childbirth, all were suspect (…)

History is personal, Gwen understands that now. All you are seeing is what's before you, the rest is guesswork.