Quotes About History

Out of Egypt have I called my son.

A doctor who cannot take a good history and a patient who cannot give one are in danger of giving and receiving bad treatment.

Cinco de Mayo makes me long for a world in which all holidays are conveniently named after the dates on which they fall.

People die but their good and bad memories live

How can the spirit of the earth like the white man?... Everywhere the white man has touched it, it is sore.

Ye Highlands and ye Lawlands,O where hae ye been?They hae slain the Earl of Murray,And laid him on the green.

Ab urbe condita [Since the founding of the city (Rome)].

London Bridge is falling down,My fair lady.

These people live again in print as intensely as when their images were captured on old dry plates of sixty years ago... I am walking in their alleys, standing in their rooms and sheds and workshops, looking in and out of their windows. Any they in turn seem to be aware of me

There are worlds of experience beyond the world of the aggressive man, beyond history, and beyond science. The moods and qualities of nature and the revelations of great art are equally difficult to define we can grasp them only in the depths of our perceptive spirit.

Que diferença de Lisboa. Não se pode viver numa cidade sem passado.»

The new world of communication is a blessing for the citizens of the world trained to think critically and knowledgeable about history. But what about citizens who have been seduced by the world of life as entertainment and commerce? They have been educated, in good part, by a world in which negative emotional provocation is the rule rather than the exception and where the best solutions for a problem have to do primarily with short-term self-interests. Can they really be blamed?

In 1585, after a year's siege by Parma's army, Antwerp - the chief stronghold of the revolt in the south - capitulated. From this point, the southern provinces were Spain's; the north was on its own. The second stage of this critical period of Low Countries history thus begins with the provinces divided. It is from this date that the firm shape of the two modern nations of Holland and Belgium starts to appear

The moment you get to know your history, it is going to change you," he said. "We are encouraging our brothers and sisters from the U.S., from the Caribbean from Europe to come back to their Motherland Africa to get to know the culture … and whatever the ancestors went through."

Languages never stand still. Modern spelling crystallises lost pronunciations: the visual never quite catches up with the aural.

There is a profound middle-class nostalgia for the days of British protection....

If only Nixon could go to China, only Obama can end the self-memorialization obsession that is presidential libraries - by not building such a shrine.

In our memories the stories of our lives defy chronology, resist transcription: past ambushes present, and future hurries into history.

Our shadows are our histories. We drag them everywhere.

Almost overnight, the streets glow with meaning. She reads inscriptions on coins, on cornerstones and tombstones, on lead seals and buttress piers and marble plaques embedded into the defensive walls—each twisting lane of the city a great battered manuscript in its own right.

And when a book goes out of the world, the memory dies a second death.

The premier achievement of human history, they said, the triumph of memory over the obliterating forces of destruction and erasure.

Boil the words you already know down to their bones,' Rex [Browning] says, 'and usually you find the ancients sitting there at the bottom of the pot, staring back up.

on her best days, she glimpses the limitless span of millennia behind her: millions of years, tens of millions.