Quotes About History

Berman points out that this sort of thinking has led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European press.

The idea that any one of our religions represents the infallible word of the One True God requires an encyclopedic ignorance of history, mythology, and art even to be entertained—as the beliefs, rituals, and iconography of each of our religions attest to centuries of cross-pollination among them.

history of Christianity is principally a story of mankind's misery and ignorance rather than of its requited love of God.

The crime of host desecration was punished throughout Europe for centuries.

Although not a single leader of the Third Reich—not even Hitler himself—was ever excommunicated, Galileo was not absolved of heresy until 1992.

President Bush

A close study of these books, and of history, demonstrates that there is no act of cruelty so appalling that it cannot be justified, or even mandated, by recourse to their pages.

At this point in their history, give most Muslims the freedom to vote, and they will freely vote to tear out their political freedoms by the root.

And we must decline to tell our children that human history began with bloody magic and will end with bloody magic in a glorious war between the righteous and the rest.

Ronald Reagan

Give people divergent, irreconcilable, and untestable notions about what happens after death, and then oblige them to live together with limited resources. The result is just what we see: an unending cycle of murder and cease-fire. If history reveals any categorical truth, it is that an insufficient taste for evidence regularly brings out the worst in us. Add weapons of mass destruction to this diabolical clockwork, and you have found a recipe for the fall of civilization.

When will we realize that the concessions we have made to faith in our political discourse have prevented us from even speaking about, much less uprooting, the most prolific source of violence in our history?

Jews have lived side by side with Christians for nearly two millennia, fathered their religion, and for reasons that are no more substantial than those underlying the belief in the Resurrection have been the objects of murderous intolerance since the first centuries after Christ.

She keeps coming over to my table and asking me if everything's all right, as though I might be able to reassure her that the world is not coming to an end. "Yes," I tell her. "Everything's fine. It's just history running its course." She smiles sweetly and flees.

These women were Jesus' great-grandmothers!

We've got our first ad from the July 29, 1950, Benton County Democrat on display today down at our Wal-Mart Visitors Center. It's for the Grand Remodeling Sale of Walton's Five and Dime, promising a whole bunch of good stuff: free balloons for the kids, a dozen clothespins for nine cents, iced tea glasses for ten cents apiece. The folks turned out, and they kept coming. Although we called it Walton's Five and Dime, it was a Ben Franklin franchise

This was about twelve years ago, when I was just starting out in the business. There was this fearsome old pirate called Greenbeard. Killed hundreds of people, sank ships, robbed, plundered, pillaged, was generally unpleasant. You know the type.' 'Why was his beard green?' 'It wasn't. But the other colours were taken. (...)

History tells us that some things never change. One of these things is: history bores a lot of people.

I know not why any one but a schoolboy in his declamation should whine over the Commonwealth of Rome, which grew great only by the misery of the rest of mankind. The Romans, like others, as soon as they grew rich, grew corrupt; and in their corruption sold the lives and freedoms of themselves, and of one another.

Why, Sir, you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.

Once a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.

Volumes have been written only to enumerate the miseries of the learned, and relate their unhappy lives and untimely deaths. To these mournful narratives I am about to add the Life of Richard Savage...

Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man's life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.

ALKALI  (A'LKALI)   n.s.[The word alkali comes from an herb, called by the Egyptians kali; by us glasswort.] This