Quotes About History

It seemed to her that he was ready to live and die for emotional errors as women did, but that men he did not call them emotional errors; he called them history, philosophy, metaphysics....

Those who think of their house as only a 'machine to live in' should judge their point of view by that Neolithic man, who also lived in a house, but a house that embodied a cosmology.

We 'preserve' folk songs, at the same time that our way of life destroys the singer…we are proud of our museums, where we display the damning evidence of a way of life that we have made impossible.

The past has a way of walking around in the present, behaving as if it were alive.

The Vanderbilt story somehow manages to be both unique and also, deeply, universally American.

Hard to imagine that the man who made the Gilded Age according to his whims and who died on the cusp of the twentieth century had a great-grandfather born the same year as the Salem witch trials, but such are the long spans of generations.

I began going through dozens of boxes stored away in her apartment and her art studio. They were filled with journals, and documents, and letters. She saved everything. Handwritten notes from her aunt Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney and schoolbooks my grandfather Reginald Vanderbilt doodled in as a child. I found old wills and financial records, and as I read the contents of these files stained by time and mold, I began to hear the voices of those people I never knew.

Tribune gossiped the following morning. "Joan of Arc, complete with solid silver mail; Christopher Columbus; Louis XVI; Queen Elizabeth I in a bright red wig; the goddess Diana; Daniel Boone. By 11:30 a bouillabaisse of kings, queens, fairies, toreadors, and gypsies blocked Fifth Avenue.

the facts of history all appeared to me like specimens in a herbarium, permanently dried, so that it was easy to forget they had once upon a time been juicy with sap and alive in the sun.

Le présent serait plein de tous les avenirs, si le passé n'y projetait déjà une histoire.

Istoria este ficÅ£iunea care s-a întâmplat. FicÅ£iunea este istoria care s-ar fi putut întâmpla

Historians rewrite the truth every day. What interests us is the truth that gets the reader to reach for his wallet

Tell the story of your village. If you tell it well, you will have told the story of the world.

North Korea is not irrational, and nothing shows this better than its continuing survival against all odds. North Korea is essentially a political living fossil, a relic of an era long gone.

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all.

Man is made up of opposing characteristics. History demonstrates vividly the fact that it always moves in the worst possible direction. Either man is not capable of directing history, or else he does direct it, but only by pushing it down the most terrible, wrong path there is. There is not a single example to prove the opposite. People are not capable of governing others. They are only capable of destroying. And materialism—naked and cynical—is going to complete the destruction.

was killed at Bridge of Dee, September

Inside the myth of Australia's economic superheroes. We're living through the second longest boom in Australian history. You can't move for talk of the budget surplus.

Teachers were powerful enough to kill the indigenous languages: they are not powerful enough to bring them back to life.

Doctrines, though useful, are the product of analytical dissection; they recast the original, equivocal, historical material into abstract, less fully realized categories of meaning. In short, doctrines are not as richly meaningful as that which they are doctrines about.

The deal is probably the most corrupt transaction in arms-trading history, with Bandar, Thatcher's son and many others implicated in receiving payments on an epic scale.

In 1897, Indiana State Legislature House Bill No. 246 attempted to decree that henceforth ? should have the value of 3. The Bill was tabled indefinitely at its second reading when a mathematics professor pointed out that their powers did not quite extend to passing laws of nature.

As a turning point, the Bay of Pigs deserves comparison with 9/11 - a moment that created an opening to pose first-order questions, but elicited instead an ill-conceived, reflexive response. As would Johnson, Carter, and George W. Bush, Kennedy in 1961 squandered an opportunity to rethink and reorient U.S. policy, with fateful implications.

the United States military did not fight a decade-long war to preserve South Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times over.