Quotes About History

This made me smile, reminding me of how much I really liked my brother. Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.

The past was always present, in its way, and you can't help but remember. Even if you can't remember at all.

If you don't pay attention to the past, you'll never understand the future. It's all linked together. You see what I'm saying?" At

It was strange, telling the story from the beginning instead of catching someone up on only the latest awful chapter.

The past was always present, in its way, and you can't help but remember. Even if you can't remember at all.

It had to be the best bargain in Toyota history

Venice the peaceful demands Venice the just.

Interesting, I thought, how quickly history becomes stories rather than reality; one step already from the truth.

I love hands like I love people. They are the maps and compasses with which we navigate our way through life, feeling our way over mountains passed and valleys crossed; they are our histories.

Living in a dream of the future is considered a character flaw. Living in the past, bathed in nostalgia, is also considered a character flaw. Living in the present moment is hailed as spiritually admirable, but truly ignoring the lessons of history or failing to plan for tomorrow are considered character flaws ... I wanted to know how to inhabit time in a way that wasn't a character flaw.

And then I think I don't need to write anything down ever again. Nothing's gone, not really. Everything that's ever happened has left its little wound.

There is somehow something extraordinarily alluring about the scent of old paper, and the feel of brittle pages.  It's a gateway opening onto the past; it's a hand stretching out from the long-ago to clasp yours.

Robert Todd Lincoln, a.k.a. Jinxy McDeath.

Winthrop and his shipmates and their children and their children's children just wrote their own books and pretty much kept their noses in them up until the day God created the Red Sox.

You know your country has a checkered past when you find yourself sitting around pondering the humanitarian upside of sticking with the British Empire.

Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

Because of the city upon a hill sound bite, A Model of Christian Charity is one of the formative documents outlining the idea of America. But dig deep into its communitarian ethos and it reads more like an America that might have been, an America fervently devoted to the quaint goals of working together and getting along. Of course, this America does exist. It's called Canada.

Parliament would abolish slavery in the British Empire in 1833, thirty years before President Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation. A return to the British fold in 1778 might have freed American slaves three decades sooner, which is what, an entire generation and a half? Was independence for some of us more valuable than freedom for all of us? As the former slave Frederick Douglass put it in an Independence Day speech in 1852, 'This is your Fourth of July, not mine'.

After Dickinson and Adams had it out over the Olive Branch Petition, Adams wrote to his wife, Abigail, that he and Dickinson "are not to be on speaking terms." How sad is it that this tiff sort of cheers me up? If two of the most distinguished, dedicated, and thoughtful public servants in the history of this republic could not find a way to agree to disagree, how can we expect the current crop of congressional blockheads to get along?

History is one war after another with a bunch of murders and natural disasters in between.

quoting Kipling, I never got over the wonder of a people who, having extirpated the aboriginals of their continent more completely than any modern race had ever done, honestly believed they were a godly little New England community, setting examples to mankind.

The newly dubbed General Lafayette was only nineteen years old. Considering Independence Hall was also where the founders calculated that a slave equals three-fifths of a person and cooked up an electoral college that lets Florida and Ohio pick our presidents, making an adolescent who barely spoke English a major general at the age I got hired to run the cash register at a Portland pizza joint was not the worst decision ever made there.

While history might be full of exemplary fathers, recorded history is not where to find them.

When Lafayette met him in 1775, the first volume of Raynal's 1770 History of the Two Indies had already been banned, which is to say it was a popular success, the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books being the unofficial bestseller list of the day.