Quotes About History

And in our tale of Noah and the ship of books, can you guess what is the flood?" She shakes her head. "Time. Day after day, year after year, time wipes the old books from the world. The manuscript you brought us before? That was written by Aelian, a learned man who lived at the time of the Caesars. For it to reach us in this room, in this hour, the lines within it had to survive a dozen centuries. A scribe had to copy it, and a second

Consider a single piece glowing in your family's stove. See it, children? That chunk of coal was once a green plant, a fern or reed that lived one million years ago, or maybe two million, or maybe one hundred million . . .

Tre ragazzi passano ridendo e Max li guarda con intensità. Su un muro butterato e chiazzato di licheni è fissata una piccola lapide di pietra. <>Ici a été tuè Buy Gaston Marcel agé de 18 ans, mort pour la France le 11 aout 1944. Jutta si siede per terra. Il mare è gonfio, grigio d'ardesia. Non ci sono lapidi per i tedeschi morti qui.

Werner Pfennig grows up three hundred miles northeast of Paris in a place called Zollverein: a four-thousand-acre coalmining complex outside Essen, Germany. It's steel country, anthracite country, a place full of holes. Smokestacks fume and locomotives trundle back and forth on elevated conduits and leafless trees stand atop slag heaps like skeleton hands shoved up from the underworld.

BohynÄ› dÄ›jin shlíží na zemi. JedinÄ› skrze ten nejžhavÄ›jÅ¡í ohe? je možno dosáhnout o?iÅ¡tÄ›ní. Vidí les umírajících slune?nic.

A portrait of the führer glowers over every classroom. Learning happens on backless benches, at wooden tables grooved by the boredom of countless boys before them—squires, monks, conscripts, cadets.

The war drops its question mark.

Staro?ytno?? wymy?lono, by by?a chlebem bibliotekarzy i nauczycieli.

But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

every lost book, before it vanished forever, got down to one final copy somewhere, and how it made Hillary think about seeing a white rhinoceros in a zoo in Czechoslovakia once, how the sign said the rhino was one of the last twenty northern white rhinos in the world, the only one left in Europe

Rome is a broken mirror, the falling straps of a dress, a puzzle of astonishing complexity. It is an iceberg floating below our terrace, all its ballasts hidden beneath the surface.

We are Malouins first, say the people of Saint-Malo.

All her life she has been led to believe that she is a child born at the end of things: the empire, the era, the reign of men on earth.

Of all the mad things we humans do, Rex once told him, there might be nothing more humbling, more noble, than trying to translate the dead languages. We don't know how the old Greeks sounded when they spoke; we can scarcely map their words onto ours; from the very start, we're doomed to fail. But in the attempt, Rex said, in trying to drag something across the river from the murk of history into our time, into our language: that was, he said, the best kind of fool's errand.

Yet they spoke now across a glass-topped dining table as if words were just words, as if their histories were equivalent.

The Americans were badly discouraged. Twelve days to go, stripped of their gear, sniffling, they huddled in a Kraków McDonald's and invoked middle-school platitudes about Cornwallis's surrender and Valley Forge, about pitching crates of tea into Boston Harbor and bloody-soled snow marches for the good of the Republic. We must not quit now, they mumbled, and dipped their chicken nuggets into a tasteless sauce.

To discover fossils, he told himself, was to reclaim answers to important questions.

All those moments, captured and doubled onto film, frozen, her own museum of natural history unfolding in front of her.

The vast percentage of any mushroom, it turns out, lives underground, in a network of extremely fine fibers, or hyphae, that prowl the soil gathering nutrients. A single cubic centimeter of dirt might contain as much as two thousand meters of hyphae. Rome is like that, I think. The bulk of it lies underground, its history ramified so densely under there, ten centuries in every thimbleful, that no one will ever unravel it all.

Every hour, she thinks, someone for whom the war was memory falls out of the world.

the air a library and the record of every life lived, every sentence spoken, every word transmitted still reverberating within it.

If you had to choose between art and the slogan, or between history and the slogan, you might as well choose the slogan and have done with pretending even to care about art and history. The reduction of all things to politics must reduce them, in their own right, to irrelevance.

The Claudii had produced Consuls in every generation since the foundation of the Republic and over the centuries had built up a well-deserved reputation for high-handedness and violence. In one typical incident, a Claudius was leading a Roman fleet into battle. The sacred chickens refused to give a favorable omen by feeding on some corn that was put out for them. So Claudius had them flung into the sea, with the words: "If they won't eat, then let them drink.

vital political truth: military victory can be secured only by reconciliation with the defeated. Although most empire-builders in the ancient world