Quotes About History

The Impressionists were better for shunning the Salon. History and experience ought to teach us to be suspicious of Goliaths, because the very thing that makes the giant so terrifying is also the source of his weakness.

Throughout the majority of human history, encounters—hostile or otherwise—were rarely between strangers.

Montezuma's speech was not his surrender; it was his acceptance of a Spanish surrender.

Mission with LeMay

Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false, or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false. It leaves out my mother's many opportunities and the importance of her cultural legacy.

Palestine is the region known as the Shephelah, a series of ridges and valleys connecting the Judaean

Art thou not he? Art thou Montezuma?

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky — but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

Small children tend to be neophobic: once they hit two or three, they shrink from new tastes. That makes sense, evolutionarily, because through much of human history that is the age at which children would have first begun to gather and forage for themselves, and those who strayed from what was known and trusted would never have survived.

Tarihteki özel yerimizin bize sunduÄŸu özel f?rsatlardan kaynaklan?yor.

passed in those days for computer terminals. In 1971, this was state of the art. The University of Michigan had one of the most advanced computer science programs in the world, and over

garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly German, which meant—given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and

Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision

They're all between sixteen and twenty, so they'd be born in the late sixties.

In attempting to wipe out the Huguenots, the French created instead a pocket in their own country that was all but impossible to wipe out.

Of the seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the

Their world—their culture and generation and family history—gave them the greatest of opportunities.

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond.

Chamberlain was the only Allied leader of that period to spend any significant time with Hitler.

the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours. This could all be a coincidence, of course. Perhaps Chamberlain and his cohort, for whatever private reason, were determined to see the Hitler they wanted to see, regardless of the evidence of their eyes and ears. Except that the same puzzling pattern crops up everywhere.

Solomon was faced day in, day out with a version of the same problem that had faced Neville Chamberlain and the British diplomatic service in the fall of 1938: he was asked

Who we are cannot be separated from where we're from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.

The slow darkening of the murals as you look from right to left. It seems somehow to symbolise the gradual imposition of the Spaniards' conquering will upon the Indians. Do you see what I mean?