Quotes About History

I went to school at this log school house. A white woman was my teacher, I do not remember her name. My father had to pay her one dollar a month for me. Us kids that went to school did not have desks, we used slates and set on the hued down logs for seats.

To leave behind what is considered normal amidst social convention and to create a new mind requires being an individual—for any species. Being uncompromising to one's vision of a new and improved self and abandoning one's prior ways of being may also be encoded in living tissue for new generations; history remembers individuals for such elegance. True evolution, then, is using the genetic wisdom of past experiences as raw materials for new challenges. What

I've always liked traveling around Europe and seeing the architecture. The buildings in capital cities have been there for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years. Some look better than the new ones.

She liked things that had been written by people who had lived short, ugly, and tragic lives. Or, who at least, were English.

He was as tall as Lincoln and just as dead.

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness. The iron door settled shut behind them, the weight

Remember the stone in her fist.

suas mãos eram como as de um formidável maestro a reger todas as sinfonias de labaredas e chamas para fazer chover os frangalhos e as ruínas de carvão da história.

There have been six extinction events in the life of this planet. I bet every one of them was the spore.

The people who had witnessed the mushroom cloud rising from Hiroshima could've felt no less.

She breathed deeply of the scent of decaying fiction, disintegrating history, and forgotten verse, and she observed for the first time that a room full of books smelled like dessert: a sweet snack made of figs, vanilla, glue, and cleverness. The

I also know that there have been many times in our history when the proximity of an election has induced exactly the kind of leadership and consensus-building that produce progress in our democracy.

Civilizations have been founded and maintained on theories which refused to obey facts.

Hominids are all the Neanderthals, australopithecines, Homo habili, Homo erecti, etc., the upright-walking apes of which we are the only surviving species.

Historical events may stay in the collective records of memory, or they may be allowed to deteriorate, slowly or rapidly, through the overt choices of the powerful. The latter usually seek to suppress or weaken collective memories of societal oppression, and to construct positive and often fictional memories of that history.

Our history was by then nothing but rocks, some scratches in the dirt, some huts, fuzzy memories passed on carelessly from the old to the young. Bottom line, we were pretty ignorant and there was a flea problem.

In 6,000 years of storytelling, [people have] gone from depicting hunting on cave walls to depicting Shakespeare on Facebook walls.

The Truman Doctrine was not a declaration of war, but the recognition of a cold war with the Soviet Union that had already begun.

Harry Truman and the United States saved the free world." Churchill's declaration that Truman saved civilization itself is perhaps the greatest tribute to the thirty-third president, a historical giant dismissed in his time as a strange, little man.

Less than eleven years before he sat behind the Oval Office desk, Harry Truman had been the presiding judge of Jackson County, concerned with road building and his county's payroll. Now he would be in charge of bringing the greatest war in history to a successful conclusion, and building a lasting peace out of the ruins of Europe and Japan.

Most Americans believed that winning two European wars in a single generation was more than should be required of American troops,

Given what we know today about Stalin's crimes against his own people, it is hard to imagine that as late as 1947, most Americans saw "Uncle Joe's" USSR as an ally. Since Germany's invasion of Russia in June 1941, the Soviet Union joined with the Allies and bore the brunt of the fighting.

Just as Churchill stood alone against Hitler's war machine in 1940, it would now be Harry Truman's government standing alone against Stalin's designs on Western Europe seven years later.

decision the president would make in 1948 would prove to be equally profound on the shape of world history when Truman decided to recognize Israel's existence following Britain's rapid withdrawal in 1948 from Palestine.