Quotes About History

It should not be thought that war, often accompanied by genocide, is a cultural artifact of a few societies. Nor has it been an aberration of history, a result of the growing pains of our species' maturation. Wars and genocide have been universal and eternal, respecting no particular time or culture.

Nature is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our fantasies and pretensions, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.

Possibly here in the Holocene, or just before 10 or 20 thousand years ago, life hit a peak of diversity. Then we appeared. We are the great meteorite.

In modern industrialized countries, networks grew to a complexity that has proved bewildering to the Paleolithic mind we inherited. Our instincts still desire the tiny, united band-networks that prevailed during the hundreds of millennia preceding the dawn of history. Our instincts remain unprepared for civilization.

The greater problems of history are not solved; they are merely forgotten.

HISTORY IS A bath of blood," wrote William James

religious faith is better interpreted as an unseen trap unavoidable during the biological history of our species. And if this is correct, surely there exist ways to find spiritual fulfillment without surrender and enslavement. Humankind deserves better.

Science has become the most democratic of all human endeavors. It is neither religion nor ideology. It makes no claims beyond what can be sensed in the real world. It generates knowledge in the most productive and unifying manner contrived in history, and it serves humanity without obeisance to any particular tribal deity.

But history shows that logic launched from introspection alone lacks thrust, can travel only so far, and usually heads in the wrong direction.

HISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT PREHISTORY, AND PREHISTORY MAKES LITTLE SENSE WITHOUT BIOLOGY. KNOWLEDGE OF PREHISTORY AND BIOLOGY IS INCREASING RAPIDLY, BRINGING INTO FOCUS HOW HUMANITY ORIGINATED AND WHY A SPECIES LIKE OUR OWN EXISTS ON THIS PLANET.

Religious believers today, as in ancient times, are not as a rule much interested in theology, and not at all in the evolutionary steps that led to the present-day world religions. They are concerned instead with religious faith and the benefits it provides. The creation myths explain all they need to know of deep history in order to maintain tribal unity. In

Edward R. Murrow

We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men – not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular

Difficulty is the excuse history never accepts.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our own history and our doctrine and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.... There is no way for a citizen of the Republic to abdicate his responsibility.

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men ... We proclaim ourselves, as indeed we are, the defenders of freedom, wherever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.

We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine; and remember that we are not descended from fearful men. Not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were for the moment unpopular.

All empires become arrogant. It is their nature.

Paris. City of love. City of dreams. City of splendour. City of saints and scholars. City of gaiety. Sink of iniquity. In two thousand years, Paris had seen it all.

For the increase in the number of my Brennan cousins," Conall remarked dryly, "we must thank the potato.

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

Only in a secular history where men and women are freed for unexpected true humanity can God reveal his own being.

All republics that acquire supremacy over other nations, rule them selfishly and oppressively. There is no exception to this in either ancient or modern times. Carthage, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Florence, Pisa, Holland, and Republican France, all tyrannized over every province and subject state where they gained authority.

871-900. Reign of Alfred in England. After a long and varied struggle, he rescues England from the Danish invaders.