Quotes About History

Two thousand years have come and gone—and not a single new god!

Every series of evolutions, according to them, was presided over by a prophet; and every prophet had his 'Hazar,'—his dynasty of a thousand years. All

There is great advantage to be gained in distantly estranging ourselves from our age and for once being driven as it were away from its shores back on to the ocean of the world-outlooks of the past. Looking back at the coast from this distance we command a view, no doubt for the first time, of its total configuration, and when we approach it again we have the advantage of understanding it better as a whole than those who have never left it.

What is new, however, is always evil, being that which wants to conquer and overthrow the old boundary markers and the old pieties; and only what is old is good. The good men are in all ages those who dig the old thoughts, digging deep and getting them to bear fruit - the farmers of the spirit. But eventually all land is depleted, and the ploughshare of evil must come again and again.

we immoralists especially are trying with all our might to remove the concept of guilt and the concept of punishment from the world and to purge psychology, history, nature, the social institutions and sanctions of them

O my friends! Thus speaketh the discerning one: shame, shame, shame—that is the history of man!

Shame, shame, shame—that is the history of the human!

The time is coming when we shall have to pay for having been Christians for two thousand years; we have lost the essential thing on which our lives depend; for a long while we will not know what to do with ourselves.

The Germans invented gunpowder—all credit to them! but they again made things square—they invented printing.)

It was odd how old buildings had secret spaces in them that weren't really hidden but were never noticed;

I sometimes think that what civilized serenity the British people possess, and small but real ability to smile at themselves, is chiefly due to their good luck in having had William Shakespeare born one of their company.

Life and study have persuaded me of the openness of history. There is no inevitability in history. Thinking about what might have happened, what could have happened, is a necessary element in trying to understand what did happen. And if, as I believe, individual acts of decency and courage make a difference, then they need to be recorded and remembered.

The Gospels did not start the Church; the Church started the Gospels. The Church did not come out of the Gospels; the Gospels came out of the Church.

Very often we call something modern because we do not know what is ancient; many so-called "modern" ideas are really old errors with new labels.

Our Blessed Lord left the world without leaving any written message. His doctrine was Himself. Ideal and History were identified in Him. The truth that all other ethical teachers proclaimed, and the light that they gave to the world, was not IN them, but OUTSIDE them. Our Divine Lord, however, identified Divine Wisdom with Himself. It was the first time in history that it was ever done, and it has never been done since.

The Church was spread throughout the entire Roman Empire before a single book of the New Testament was written.

As scientific truths put us in an intelligent relaton with the cosmos, as historic truth puts us in temporal relation with the rise and fall of civilization, so does Christ put us in intelligent relation with God the Father; for He is the only possible Word by which God can address Himself to a world of sinners.

Like all great divorces, whether they be marital or epistemological, it had its antecedents in history.

There would be a course on the philosophy of history; another year the philosophy of Marxism, another the philosophy of religion, the philosophy of science, etc. All of these were presented in the light of the thought of St. Thomas.

Three dominant evils prevailed—clerical concubinage, simony

The vision of social amelioration without spiritual regeneration has constituted a temptation to which many important men in history have succumbed completely. But to Him, this would not be adequate service of the Father; there are deeper needs in man than crushed wheat; and there are greater joys than the full stomach.

The deletion of an apostrophe and a single letter turned "Jane's" into "Jane," and the words "and her" were inserted immediately thereafter. Now the crown was to pass not to the male heirs of Jane Grey but to "the Lady Jane and her heirs masles." (Edward was of course highly literate, but spelling was a kind of free-form creative art in the sixteenth century

from 1550 to 1650, a century that encompassed the careers of Shakespeare and other writers of gigantic stature, Calvin was England's most published author.

Almost everything they heard and read assured them that their glorious armies would soon be victorious, that their cause was a noble one, and that the enemy was wicked in ways rarely seen in history.