Quotes About History

But among the great road trips of American history--from Lewis and Clark to Alexis de Tocqueville to Jack Kerouac-- it hardly rates a mention.

I want to write a book which is the history of comedy.

Why write about the past? Well, there's more of it.

Unlike poetry and music, the art of history is cumulative.

It is the greatest scam in history. I am amazed, appalled and highly offended by it. Global Warming It is a scam. Some dastardly scientists with environmental and political motives manipulated long term scientific data to create an illusion of rapid global warming.

And this is good old Boston,The home of the bean and the cod,Where the Lowells talk to the CabotsAnd the Cabots talk only to God.

I do this because we have always done this. I do this in a way beyond religion. I do this in a way of culture

Patriots built Auschwitz. You start believing that "my country wrong or right" shit, and it always ends up at the same place: a pit filled with bones.

He had a love of books, for in books was recorded the knowledge of all those who had gone before him.

The past never truly dies. It is there, waiting, just below the surface of the now.

War merely gives people an excuse to indulge themselves further, to murder with impunity. There were wars before it, and there will be wars after it, and in between people will still fight one another and hurt one another and maim one another and betray one another, because that is what they have always done.

But there was a saying in Hebrew, "We survived Pharoah, we'll survive this too." In the words of the old joke, it was the theme of every Jewish holiday: they tried to kill us, they failed, so let's eat!

and because atoms are so small, and are constantly being recycled, every breath you take contains atoms that were once breathed by Julius Caesar and Elvis Presley. So a little bit of you formerly ruled Rome, and sang, "Blue Suede Shoes".

Because to ignore what had happened in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.

There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hair's breadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

how the ruins of a Saxon settlement might provide the foundations for a Roman garrison, that garrison give way to a Norman fortress, the fortress to a medieval town

The Great Malevolence had been squatting in the blackness for a very long time. He was there billions of years before people, or dinosaurs, or small, single-celled organisms that decided one day to become larger, multicelled organisms so they could, at some point in the future, invent literature, painting, and annoying ring tones for cell phones.

Americans had endured centuries of patronization by the British. One became inured to it after a while.

He believes it might have been Mark Twain who said that history does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I felt about the city as I felt about the house in Scarborough : it was a place where the past was alive in the present, where a man could find a place for himself as long as he understood the fact that he was a link in the chain, for a man cut off from his past was a man adrift in the present.

The presence in the living room called to her, summoning her in a hundred voices and none, a great dissonant harmony alien yet familiar, like a song that, once heard, insinuates itself into one's history, finding echoes in old melodies; a configuration once hidden, now revealed. Step

were indeed the case that behind every great fortune lay a great crime—and this was as true of the New World as of the Old, if

it takes time to get used to a strange house, especially one as old as this. Even I sometimes find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm alone in it. It's the way of such places, isn't it? They wear their history heavily.

The present is history's child