Quotes About History

In fact, no immigrant in American history has ever made a larger contribution than Alexander Hamilton.

The first great skeptic of American exceptionalism, he refused to believe that the country was exempt from the sober lessons of history.

For a man who has compared himself to Theodore Roosevelt and the nation's challenges to those of the Gilded Age, Obama put forward a tepid agenda.

Part of the problem is voters know relatively little about Romney. And some of what they know about him complicates his task: Romney has a history of flip-flopping on issues, he's extraordinarily wealthy, and he can be tone-deaf about what moves voters. He just doesn't seem comfortable in his skin.

Hollywood has a history of raising expectations beyond Washington's reach, of appealing to the very American desire to mythologize political leaders, particularly the president.

Houses, like faces, hide all kinds of memories.

The more I learned, the more I hated the Man and wanted to right the wrongs of Louisiana's modern-day slave masters. I sang Denvery's story like a songbird to anyone who would listen. Then one day, a thought hit me like a right cross to the head: My own granddaddy had not been so much different from the Man. Fairer, yes. An honest and decent man in the Texas of his day. But the wages he paid were still no excuse for the pitiful way we treated the folks who worked his land.

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.

There's too much history to tell, really, about all of us and how we'd do things like hike and how she loved that I ran so much.

Back a hundred years ago, especially around Woodrow Wilson, what happened in this country is we took freedom and we chopped it into pieces.

I had the privilege of practicing medicine in the early '60s, before we had any government. It worked rather well, and there was nobody on the street suffering with no medical care.

Just think of what Woodrow Wilson stood for: he stood for world government. He wanted an early United Nations, League of Nations. But it was the conservatives, Republicans, that stood up against him.

Today's events are reminiscent of the Old Testament story of how the Israelites demanded a king over God's objection. They believed that a king would give them peace and security. The results proved otherwise.

It must be remembered that a vast majority of mankind's history has been spent living under the rule of tyrants and authoritarians. The ideas of Liberty are very new when you consider the big picture. By contrast, various forms of socialism and fascism have been adopted over and over again. Be wary of those who try to present these old and tired ideas as something new and exciting. Liberty and free markets are the way forward if we truly desire peace and prosperity.

History has shown that the masses have been quite receptive to the promises of authoritarians which are rarely if ever fulfilled.

1913 wasn't a very good year. 1913 gave us the income tax, the 16th amendment and the IRS.

Sadly this process started early in our history with Adams's Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798 and has continued through our history to the present day with Obama reinvigorating the Espionage Act of 1917.

The system that existed in Germany at that time tragically prevented the people from protecting themselves from tyrannical government. This is a system many people vehemently want to impose in America.

Even today, authors who claim correctly, as Patrick Buchanan does in his book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that both World War I and World War II were "unnecessary wars" are shunned and ridiculed. Such a suggestion is so at odds with how history is taught in most US schools that many people are unwilling to even consider arguments backing Buchanan's conclusion.

Government wars and exterminations in the twentieth century reached 262 million people killed by their own governments and 44 million people killed in wars. I fear that doesn't say much for the evolutionary process.

The US military is the most powerful in all of history, yet Americans continue to die in a series of wars, the treasury is bare, and the US is the most hated nation in the world.

But nothing is solid and permanent. Our lives are raised on the shakiest foundations. You don't need to read history books to know that. You only have to know the history of your own life.

Water has its own archaeology, not a layering but a leveling, and thus is truer to our sense of the past, because what is memory but near and far events spread and smoothed beneath the present's surface.

Prophecy can be defined as God's revelation regarding history in advance. The backdrop is that only God—who is omniscient (or all-knowing)—knows the future.