Quotes About History

Sitting in the Oval Office, he pointed to a small statue of Andrew Jackson, one of Truman's heroes,

At six p.m., Washington time, the new state was declared in Palestine, and given the name of Israel. It could not survive without the recognition and support of the most powerful country in the world. At 6:11, the White House announced that the United States would do just that by recognizing Israel's existence. The Israeli nation was born, and America was the first to acknowledge it.

Chaim Weizmann, who not long before had slipped into the White House unseen, was to be the first president of Israel.

It was a spectral Manhattan, a double-exposed landscape where the past folded back over on itself in overlapping decades.

The past is never done with us in any substantial way. The most cursory examination reveals its bloody fingerprints on every surface of our lives.

The Sumerians, living five thousand years ago in what is now Iran, are commonly believed to be the world's first civilization.

Our word plumbing actually derives from the Latin plumbum, meaning "lead," and that is also why this element's chemical symbol is Pb.

Lead carbonate was the main white pigment used in paint up until about 1950, and it was still in general use until 1980, when it was finally phased out.

At one time, people also preserved meat by soaking it in a brine solution or by covering it with whole grains of salt (which were known as "corn," hence the origin of "corned beef").

This book argues that the history of federal student loan policies is best understood as a series of messes in which attention became focused on some particular aspect of a larger problem and well-intentioned policies were devised to address each narrowly defined concern.

His mother taught him mathematics, literature, and language at home during the day. His father taught him German history and world history and culture in the evenings. And whenever he could get away from his factories, Uncle Avi came and took him up into the mountains to hike and to fix things and learn to work with his hands.

The Jews of Europe had been foolish to entrust their safety and security to anyone but themselves. What if they had been organized? What if they had been armed and trained and immobilized? No one could have sent them to concentration camps to perish by the hundreds of thousands.

The architecture of a story can be a little bit different if it's a true story.

The great classical city almost everywhere was both suffused with religion and instructed by it. "Cities did not ask if the institutions which they adopted were useful," noted the classical historian Fustel de Coulanges. "These institutions were adopted because religion had wished it thus."54

The process of ascent and decline of cities is both rooted in history and changed by it. Successful urban areas today must still resonate with the ancient fundamentals—places sacred, safe, and busy. This was true five thousand years ago, when cities represented a tiny portion of humanity, and in this century, the first in which the majority live in cities.

The ancient writer Suetonius tells the story that an inventor around 70 CE displayed to a Roman emperor a machine that could move columns, only to be dismissed with the objection that such labor-saving devices would cause the poor to starve by robbing them of employment.

Haarlem Village or

How much evil throughout history could have been avoided had people exercised their moral acuity with convictional courage and said to the powers that be, 'No, I will not. This is wrong, and I don't care if you fire me, shoot me, pass me over for promotion, or call my mother, I will not participate in this unsavory activity.' Wouldn't world history be rewritten if just a few people had actually acted like individual free agents rather than mindless lemmings?

When I first called Jerry Wexler, the man everybody most associates with Berns's career, and told him I planned to work on this book, Wexler's affable tone disappeared. "I'll tell you this," he said. "I don't know where he's buried, but if I did, I would piss on his grave.

The story of Bert Berns lies buried under layers of history. Much of his music has gone unheard since its original release.

To these old hands, rock and roll sounded like musical illiteracy, the undignified, untutored keenings of woebegone Negroes, hicks, and juvenile delinquents.

Every rock-face tells a story, every valley hides a secret. You can see time itself shaped in these rocks, if you look.

They were the progressives, the freethinkers, the radicals of their day. History favoured such people. They had brought great change, and great innovation, and the present was all the greater for their inspiration. But now, Ibrahim believed, the pendulum had swung too far. The Great Cause had become merely an ideology, and ideology, Ibrahim knew only too well, was the antithesis of reason.

Equality. It was the oldest of human ideals. And those who forgot their past were doomed to forget why it had become such a grand ideal in the first place.