Quotes About History

Europe was on the receiving end of the slavery it was starting to inflict on West Africa – though the numbers slaved to Islam far exceeded those of black slaves taken in the sixteenth century;

All the inhabitants of Cyprus are slaves to the Venetians," wrote the visitor Martin von Baumgarten in 1508, "obliged to pay to the state a third of all their increase or income…and which is more, there is yearly some tax or other imposed on them, with which the poor common people are so flayed and pillaged that they hardly have the wherewithal to keep soul and body together.

So huge was the architecture of the conflict between Islam and Byzantium that no Muslim banners would be unfurled again before the city walls for another 650 years – a span of time greater than that separating us from 1453 – but prophecy decreed that they would return.

It is far better for a country to remain under the rule of Islam than be governed by Christians who refuse to acknowledge the rights of the Catholic Church. Pope Gregory VII, 1073

Despite the efforts of some Turkish historians to claim her as an ethnic Turk and a Muslim, the strong probability is that she was a Western slave, taken in a frontier raid or captured by pirates, possibly Serbian or Macedonian and most likely born a Christian – a possibility that casts a strange light on the paradoxes in Mehmet's nature.

It was the emergence of the Turks that reawakened the slumbering spirit of jihad.

No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.

In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.

Proto Indo European!

Well, you know what, I'm 60 years old, and I've been interested in politics since I was on my daddy's knee. During the 1948 election, we were praying for Truman. I know a lot about politics.

during and immediately after the Revolution, a period that Williston Walker (1894, p. 319) described as "the epoch of the lowest spiritual vitality that our churches have ever experienced." Or, to quote Leonard Woolsey Bacon (1897, p. 230): "The closing years of the eighteenth century show the lowest low-water mark of the lowest ebb-tide of spiritual life in the history of the American church.

History," Bagehot wrote, "is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it.

And let's not forget "Dane-Geld": It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away." And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane.

My father's haunting memories of war had been transformed into my own haunting memories. Such is the power of war and memory.

For what are the Aegyption Hierogliphicks, and the whole History of the Pagan Gods; the Hints, and Fictions of the Wise Men of Old, but in Effect, a kind of Philosophical Mythology ; Which is, in truth, no other, then a more Agreeable Vehicle found out for Conveying to us the Truth and Reason of Things, though the medium of Images and Shadows.

The book is worth reading, in part because it is enjoyable to read of other people's folly, not to mention their avarice and stupidity." -- Roger Lowenstein, reviewing "Devil Take the Hindmost: a History of Financial Speculation", WSJ 6-1-99

Lawrence Summers, now the U.S. Treasury secretary , told The Wall Street Journal after the crash, "The efficient market hypothesis is the most remarkable error in the history of economic theory.

The Nazi leaders cannot be voided from human society simply because it is pleasanter or more convenient to regard them now as outside the pale of humanity.

Nazism was not merely a factor in the immediate past; it was a manifestation of a part of human nature, and it may recur at any time and in any place.

If you don't write it down, it never happened. - Roger Tory Peterson

At times, we were forced to go through a history of dependence, unable to determine our own destiny. But today, we are at the threshold of a new turning point.

The frown again. So much contained there in the flex of a few muscles. All of history, it sometimes seemed to me. All of ours, at least.

When you have known someone your whole life you don't need a lot of warm-up time to get into a big argument. All the fore-play has been done years ago, and so the battle sits in your memory like stove gas awaiting the match. A wrong word, a careless allusion, and the old fire is suddenly raging.

Most people know about the famous cathedrals of Europe, or the caravan routes in the East," Bazzi said. "But few people know about the ancient route where knowledge was shared. We call it the Ink Road, and you are at its epicenter. - about Timbuktu