Quotes About History

In fact I had no historical consciousness in those days, and no interest in acquiring one. It struck me as narrow-minded to privilege historical events, simply because things happened to have worked out that way. Why be a slave to the arbitrary truth? I didn't care about truth; I cared about beauty. It took me many years – it took the experience of lived time – to realize that they really are the same thing.

Here is a quick and generally reliable rule to follow. If people have always said it, it is probably true; it is the distilled wisdom of the ages. If people have not always said it, but everybody is saying it now, it is probably a lie; it is the concentrated madness of the moment. People

The computer on the desk of the student in school knows no history. It is not like a book, worn at the edges by human hands. No little child has written a note in it, long ago. It will not be passed down to the children of the children who use it. Its "meaning" is that there is no enduring meaning.

I stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans "sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

the judge Don Achille speaks up, with sly and devastating irony, saying that the whole history of mankind is the history of rhetoric: that is, the history of moving masses of people by words, words, words. That is all there is in Political Life Under Compulsion. Words are not troves of truth or bands of friendship. They are tools, and the people who use them are tools, and so are the people upon whom they are used.

stand with Livy, who at the final hardening of Rome's republican arteries, wrote that the study of his land's history was the study of the rise and fall of moral strength, with duty and severity giving way to ambition, avarice, and license, till his fellow Romans "sank lower and lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor their cure.

Had a long talk to the Chinese First Secretary at the embassy a very charming man called Liao Dong and said how much I admired Mao Tse tung or Zedong, the greatest man of the twentieth century. He said that I couldn't admire Mao more than he did. I asked him how Mao was viewed now. He said Mao was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong; the Cultural Revolution didn't work. He said he had been named after Mao it was amusing.

The complete document—" Letter from Farside"—is explosive, incoherent, and riddled with factual inaccuracies and highly questionable readings of history. It's also 3,600 pages long.

the white stain of chalk mixed with the clay topsoil zigzagging across the freshly-turned earth, the tell-tale marks of the German trenches from which ***** had been enfiladed. Fifty ploughings and fifty harvests had failed to erase those marks, so maybe they were etched into the land for all time, just like the spadework of the ancient peoples which the archaeologists studied with such fervour.

Paradoxically, the period of liberation from European power structures marked an unprecedented embrace of modern European cultural and political norms. It marked probably the most dramatic iconoclasm towards Asian traditional cultures of any period in history.

Sometimes it is better to imagine the past than to remember it.

We have lost the splendors our ancestors created, and we go elsewhere. People are reminded of that every day here, where an older world, still visible on every corner, fails to hide its superior ways.

The Middle East that had fascinated, preoccupied, and saddened me for decades was gone.

Every war is different. Every war is the same.

il y a ce qui subsiste d'une usine dont le cœur atomique est en feu depuis trois cent soixante-deux ans.

Mankind has conceived history as a series of battles; hitherto it has considered fighting as the main thing in life.

Look for the whole story and you'll get a lot closer to the truth.

I think there has been a great deal of valuable revisionism in women's history.

A frequent charge made against "Antoinette" was that she was bathed in the blood of the French people; the truth of it was, of course, exactly the other way round.

Looking without passion is always a good plan where history is concerned. But is it really possible with regard to the career and character of Marie Antoinette?

Certainly, it is impossible to understand the course of the Powder Treason from now on unless one takes into account the magnetism of Robert Catesby.

In the 1920s and 1930s Germany was the leader of the world in most areas you could name—the physical sciences, historical scholarship, music, philosophy, public education. The most sobering fact about the Holocaust is that it was there, and not in some backward, underdeveloped country, that it occurred.

the Cross sets the world's history into the course of God's.

Phineas Gage's case is not the only important historical source in the effort to understand the neural basis of reasoning and decision making;