Quotes About History

They did not know what we can now sense as we contemplate the course of history: that change begins in the soul before it shows in our lives...

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

But that is past and should remain deep in the past

An Empress drank her husband's blood in long draughts thousands of years ago.

Deutschland hat Rußland den Krieg erklärt - Nachmittag Schwimmschule. (Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming in the afternoon) Franz Kafka, diary, August 2, 1914

The history of philosophy is actually full of people who argue for rather wild and incredible views, and their reputations are based on the skill of arguing for them.

During the 1980s, many people mistook Thatcherism and Reaganism - actually a wild form of liberalism - for conservatism.

I was weaned not on television or Wild West sagas but on stories of nationalism and patriotism. I would sit at my mother's feet by the hour and drink in these exciting tales of the freedom fighters in our family.

Historically, epics are set in Africa or Asia or the Wild West, but if you make an epic today it's hard to disassociate from the contemporary realities of those places.

Every time I see something about the Wild West, I'm reminded that our version of history may not be what really happened.

My grandmother on my mother's side lived to nearly 100 years old, and she had seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show as a little girl and had come to Texas by covered wagon.

Europe began as the relatively empty, uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.

El Paso is the final Wild, Wild West city.

Things aren't much wilder now, I don't think, than they were back then. Of course I just read about all the goings-on now. Ha.

I believe that Ronald Reagan will someday make this country what it once was... an arctic wilderness.

All the great crimes of history, lest we forget, have their genesis in the moral wilderness of their times.

Most Americans have no clue that before there were highways, there were only waterways to get through the wilderness. If you weren't on a lake or a river, you were in a jungle.

As founder and co-chair of the upper Mississippi River Congressional task force, I have long sought to preserve the river's health and historical multiple uses, including as a natural waterway and a home to wildlife, for the benefit of future generations of Americans.

The facts of Watergate have been wildly exaggerated.

So this was the big secret historians keep to themselves: historical research is wildly seductive and fun. There's a thrill in the process of digging, then piecing together details like a puzzle.

The past is not dead, it is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make.

My fellow Americans, we are and always will be a nation of immigrants. We were strangers once, too.

Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We, of this Congress and this administration, will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation.

When it comes to American Indians, mainstream America suffers from willful blindness.