Quotes About History

What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

What's more American than violence?" Hayduke wanted to know. "Violence, it's as American as pizza pie.

To make the distinction unmistakably clear: Civilization is the vital force in human history; culture is that inert mass of institutions and organizations which accumulate around and tend to drag down the advance of life; Civilization is Giordano Bruno facing death by fire; culture is the Cardinal Bellarmino, after ten years of inquisition, sending Bruno to the stake in the Campo di Fiori...

Yes, I know, if the American Indians had enforced such a policy none of us pale-faced honkies would be here. But the Indians were foolish, and divided, and failed to keep our WASP ancestors out. They've regretted it ever since.

Keep it like it was.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

On no other stage are the scenes shifted with a swiftness so like magic as on the great stage of history when once the hour strikes.

Badly off as the men...were in your day, they were more fortunate than their mothers and wives.

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. the idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

Human history, like all great movements, was cyclical, and returned to the point of beginning. The idea of indefinite progress in a right line was a chimera of the imagination, with no analogue in nature. The parabola of a comet was perhaps a yet better illustration of the career of humanity. Tending upward and sunward from the aphelion of barbarism, the race attained the perihelion of civilization only to plunge downward once more to its nether goal in the regions of chaos.

an emerging racial imagery crisis for Europeans. The Europeans could not enslave a race that they also felt was one of the primary sources of the rise of their own civilization. A psychological shift occurred. Soon Blacks were psychologically erased from Egyptian history as anything other than slaves. Blacks were "scientifically" lowered to the level of simpleton, sensuous, inferior, brutish, bodily, and so on and so forth, and therefore "naturally" suited to slavery.

my Clodius, how little your countrymen know of the true versatility of a Pericles, of the true witcheries of an Aspasia!

In the laws which regulate the Universe it is decreed that nothing wicked can long endure. Be wise, and let history warn thee. Thou standest on the verge of two worlds, — the Past and the Future; and voices from either shriek omen in thy ear. I have done. I bid thee farewell.

Everything in life stands on what has gone before. You do this or that because, at the moment, it seems what to do. You are faced with this or that because of what happened somewhere earlier in your journey of life. What happened earlier depends on what went before that. Who would dispute that nobody stands in a void or a vacuum?

It is always unsafe to detach a custom from its hold on past events, treating it as an isolated fact to be simply disposed of by some plausible explanation.

do not think I have ever met with a single fact which seems to me to justify the theory, of which Dr. von Martius is perhaps the leading advocate, that the ordinary condition of the savage is the result of degeneration from a far higher state.

Homer and Sylla, History of Interest Rates, p. 191.

In the present period of history we find ourselves in one of the worst possible cosmic ages, with Buddhism in full decline, and the people everywhere singularly obtuse about matters spiritual, and incredibly dimwitted when confronted with the wisdom of the sages.

It's always the case that history is a tale told by the victors. But the triumph of the scientific worldview has been so complete that we've lost more than the losing side's version of history. We've lost the idea that a view different from ours is even possible. Today we take for granted that originality is a word of praise. New strikes us as nearly synonymous with improved. But for nearly all of human history, a new idea was a dangerous idea.

The cliché has it that an unknown subject is a closed book, but Egypt was different. Egypt was an open book, with illustrations on every page, that no one knew how to read.

archaeological riddles

But wait till Ike had to deal with de Gaulle, whom I had seen in the Middle East. Giraud then would seem to Ike the acme of rational and complaisant Frenchmen.

For all mankind that unstained scroll unfurled, Where God might write anew the story of the World.

in old times inventors were not always treated very kindly. If people thought they were sorcerers, or in league with the Devil, they did not care much for the invention.