Quotes About History

The fall of Stalingrad is the finish of Europe. There was a cataclysm. The core of it all was Stalingrad. There you can say it was finished and well finished, the white civilization.

Nu zijn we dan aan het eind van twintig eeuwen hoge beschaving beland en toch zou geen enkel politiek stelsel twee maanden waarheid overleven. Hieronder versta ik zowel de marxistische als onze burgerlijke en fascistische maatschappij.

Dinosaurs lasted so much longer than we have, or probably will, yet their brains were so little. Meaning that stupidity is a good strategy for survival? Our level of intelligence could be a maladaptation, a wrong turn, an aberration.

Wadsworth Atheneum.

Anthropology was the study of humanity. Susannah's interest lay in the way human beings related to each other and their environments at various periods of history.

Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay, Centre Pompidou, Cluny, Musée Jacquemart-André

to this day, there are ravens at the Tower of London. They're fed by the Ravenmaster of the Yeoman Warders.

One age misunderstands another; and a petty age misunderstands all the others in its own nasty way.

Ebbene signor Meis, il destino di Roma è l'identico. I papi ne avevano fatto – a modo loro, s'intende – un'acquasantiera; noi italiani ne abbiamo fatto, a modo nostro, un portacenere.

He hated the American way of thought that said all things could be repaired, all things surmounted by a trick of attitude. History is trivial in this country, he said. Forgetting is the way to bliss. Ignorance is a badge of honor.

When push came to shove, the yacht kids were just too WASP for him. He was a jewel of Kazakh youth, he liked to say—studied history so he could boast about Mongolian hordes. He'd mailed a cheek swab to some genetic-testing service, and the results suggested he was Genghis Khan's nephew. Some generations removed. But basically, yeah, he said.

In movies, makeovers were treated like a triumph of the human spirit. It suggested we'd had a low bar for triumph, in recent history. A dash of lipstick qualified, a haircut and some styling gel. A new outfit. That was what the human spirit had turned into.

A German goldsmith covered a bit of metal with cloth in the 14th century and gave mankind its first button. It was hard to know this as politics, because it plays like the work of one person, but nothing is isolated in history -- certain humans are situations.

Long time lines trail behind every idea, object, person, pet, vehicle, and event.

The future is fixed. The past ever-changing

There's America, there's the South, and then there's Mississippi.

I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again. [Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ's Special Counsel Harry McPherson.]

I love this medieval stuff," Archie announced to whatever assembly was there, "don't you?" And with that, he slapped her happily on the rump—to the accompaniment of more horrified gasps—and continued on his way.

FACT The Native Americans invented the game lacrosse.

That man was Aldus Manutius the Elder (1450-1515) and I will happily admit I hadn't heard of him until about a year ago, but am now absolutely kicking myself that I never volunteered to have his babies.

You guys put them all on a boat and sent them over here to North America a couple of hundred years ago." "The English maybe would do such a thing. Is what they did with the criminals, so maybe they would send you the smelly cats. But no the Italians. We would no be so cruel.

Okay. Let's see... She considered her past, and then smiled wryly and shook her head. Well, I was a perfume maker, Amaone, concubine, a duchess, a pirate, a madam, and then a hunter. Harper's eyebrows had slid up his forehead as she rattled of her resume.

There was hardly an eminent writer in Paris who was unacquainted with the inside of the Conciergerie or the Bastille.

Human beings are too important to be treated as mere symptoms of the past.