Quotes About History

North American civilization is one of the ugliest to have emerged in human history, and it has engulfed the world. Asphalt and exhaust fumes clog the villages…. This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see… the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the globe.

Paris is an unsolved puzzle. She inspires me in a way that other places don't. And she demands more of me. Just try to write about her without bumping into cliche after cliche.

It's very clear that global climate change is occurring on earth, but it's also been very clear that that has always happened on earth. We've always had a changing climate on earth. We all know about ice ages. We know when our continent was covered with ice sheets. We know glaciers come and they go. It puzzles me that people forget that.

To excavate a pyramid is the dream of every archaeologist.

I became interested, through reading the works of some novelist, in Egyptology and made a study of the pyramids. It was just a hobby, but I had a desire to know all I could about everything I could.

I already find pyramids from space. Is there anything cooler than that?

Even the pyramids might one day disappear, but not the Palestinians longing for their homeland.

All through history, a nation or a civilization's enduring glory is articulated by its mega constructions - the pyramids, the lofty cathedrals of the Christian world.

One of my favourite things to think about is, if you could be invisible and go back in time, where would you go? I've always said ancient Egypt. I would love to see them building the pyramids, and I've always had a real fascination with medieval time and monarchy in medieval times.

Medieval justice was a quaint thing.

A lot of the changes are so gradual that they don't even qualify as news, or even as interesting: they're so mundane that we just take them for granted. But history shows that it's the mundane changes that are more important than the dramatic 'newsworthy' events.

We are better placed than Pakistan as we have been playing against top teams around the world. Pakistan on the other hand failed to qualify for the Olympics for the first time in their history.

If I had all the qualities that the newspapers are talking about, I'd be the best player in history.

I think the rise of quantitative econometrics and a highly mathematical approach to risk management was the obverse of a decline in interest in financial history.

It is often said of me - some intend it as a compliment, others as a complaint - that I write about a single subject: the Holocaust. I have no quarrel with that. Why shouldn't I accept, with certain qualifications, the place assigned to me on the shelves of libraries?

This is a day we have managed to avoid for a quarter of a century.

'Captives' was a deliberate bridging exercise, an attempt to use detailed knowledge of what Britain was like on the inside, to reach a deeper, more variegated understanding of how its peoples experienced external adventures and aggression over a quarter of a millennium in four continents.

As for AIDS, it's a plague. We are human, we get plagues. They come along every so often, kill off two thirds of the population; in the next generation it's a quarter; after that it's a childhood disease.

When I consider what it was that moved me to join the Communist Party, I have to cast my mind back for more than a quarter of a century to try and ascertain what precisely my motives at that time were.

Drew Henson could go down as the greatest quarterback in the history of Michigan football.

I know of musicians who have played together for decades who hate each other. The Modern Jazz Quartet for one.

My dad, who likes genealogy, knows who was the first guy that came from France in 1655, and the guy settled in Montreal, and Montreal is an island where the city is in Quebec.

I found a 'lost' manuscript called the Book of Soyga that had once belonged to Queen Elizabeth I's court astrologer, John Dee, in Oxford's Bodleian Library. Everybody thought it was the missing key to Dee's interest in magic. Of course, it wasn't really lost. It was there, in the catalog.

My father, a captain in the 5th Battalion of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, landed in Normandy the day after D-Day.