Quotes About History

History, memory – that is what makes us human, that, and our knowledge of death: 'by man came death.' For knowledge of death makes us wish to extend our lives at the expense of others. And this is the root of the struggle for power.

What did Danton lose his head for, or why was there a Napoleon, if it wasn't to make a nobility of us all?

History is the history of cruelty, not love, as soft men think.

Without teaching, Jewry was an impossibility.

But what about justice?—Justice! Look who wants justice! Most of mankind has lived and died without—totally without it. People by the billions and for ages sweated, gypped, enslaved, suffocated, bled to death, buried with no more justice than cattle.

Hearts quaking with cheap and feeble charity or oozing potato love have not written history.

His early book, not much noticed when it was published, was now on many reading lists, and the younger generation of historians accepted it as a model of the new sort of history, "history that interests us"—personal, engagée—and looks at the past with an intense need for contemporary relevance.

Israelis must, in fact, bear in mind four thousand years of Jewish history. The world has been thrown into their arms and they are required to perform an incredible balancing act.

CERTAIN oddities about Israel: Because people think so hard here, and so much, and because of the length and depth of their history, this sliver of a country sometimes seems quite large. Some dimension of mind seems to extend into space.

There is, besides, a considerable tradition of left-wing anti-Semitism in France and Germany. The history of Socialist anti-Semitism is, alas, long and dirty, but I doubt that much of this older, leftist anti-Semitism has survived among European intellectuals.

But this might have been construed to mean that what the Nazis had done to the Jews resembled what Zionism had done to the Arabs—a parallel no sane person would agree to.

Rescue is the true aim of Zionism—not the "liberation" of the Promised Land but the rescue of the Jews, repeatedly threatened with annihilation.

the anchor man thrown overboard has simply rooted us in history's repeating cycle

Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.

History is the long, difficult and confused dream of Mankind.

Your best work involves timing. If someone wrote the best hip hop song of all time in the Middle Ages, he had bad timing.

How did people steal before computers? - Dogbert

Every generation before us believed, like Snickers, that it had things figured out. We now know that every generation before us was wrong about a lot of it. Is it likely that you were born at the tipping point of history, in which humans know enough about reality to say we understand it? This is another case where humility is your friend.

about finding evidence of the past) And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times, with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they would still be nothing but impressions of the past supporting other impressions of the past.

also have a bad history with the self-checkout stations at my local Safeway grocery store. In my defense, the instructions for those things were obviously written by Russian spies as part of their plan to rip apart the fabric of our society.

British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.

History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly's wings that triggers a hurricane.

Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend's army go in return for one million English pounds' worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he'd very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.

The Confederate Army's fight against overwhelming odds, is one of the most glorious moments in Anglo-Saxon history." —Sir Winston Churchill