Quotes About History

Los que no construyen deben quemar. Es algo tan viejo como la historia y la delincuencia juvenil.

And Ireland itself? Is the largest open-air penal colony in history

Without knowing I had been Tut's child all the while, writing the Red World's hieroglyphics, thinking I thrived futures even in dust-rinsed pasts.

And when the war's over, some day, some year, the books can be written again, the people will be called in, one by one, to recite what they know and we'll set it up in type until another Dark age.

Sometimes i'm ancient. I'm afraid of children my own age. They kill each other... I'm afraid of them and they don't like me because I'm afraid. My Uncle says his grandfather remembered when children didn't kill each other. But that was a long time ago when they had things different. They believed in responsibility...

And yet . . .looking here at this bottle which by its number signalized the day when Colonel Freeleigh had stumbled and fallen six feet into the earth, Douglas could not find so much as a gram of dark sediment, not a speck of the great flouring buffalo dust, not a flake of sulphur from the guns at Shiloh . . .

Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots.

All of his books were burned in the Great Fire. That's thirty years ago—2006.

All dead cities have some kind of ghosts in them. Memories, I mean.

And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman's Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.

we came upon the bones of the Venice Pier and the struts, tracks, and ties of the ancient roller-coaster collapsed on the sand and being eaten by the sea.

the Disney organization hired me to help plan the dreams that went into Spaceship Earth, part of Epcot Center, a permanent world's fair, now building to open in 1982. In that one building, I have crammed a history of mankind, coming and going back and forth in time, then plunging into our wild future in space. Including dinosaurs.

Some day the load we're carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us.

It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books.

Those who don't build must burn. It's as old as history and juvenile delinquents.' 'So that's what I am.' 'There's some of it in all of us.

Does Magna Carta mean nothing to you? Did she die in vain? That gallant Hungarian peasant girl who forced King John to sign the pledge at Runnymede and closed the boozers at half past ten?

The condition of my feet in those days was quite different from what they are today. Chasing the Hun across Europe, that's what flattened these, mate.

Myth is not the same as history; myths are not inspiring stories of people who lived notable lives. No, myth is the transcendent in relationship to the present.

We couldn't understand because we were too far... and could not remember because we were traveling in the night of first ages, those ages that had gone, leaving hardly a sign... and no memories.

I am afraid that if you want to go down into history you'll have to do something for it.

What is a novel if not a conviction of our fellow-men's existence strong enough to take upon itself a form of imagined life clearer than reality and whose accumulated verisimilitude of selected episodes puts to shame the pride of documentary history.

the chipped plates might have been disinterred from some kitchen midden near an inhabited lake; and the chops recalled times more ancient still. They brought forcibly to one's mind the night of ages when the primeval man, evolving the first rudiments of cookery from his dim consciousness, scorched lumps of flesh at a fire of sticks...

Hunters for gold or pursuers of fame, they all had gone out on that stream, bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire. What greatness had not floated on the ebb of that river into the mystery of an unknown earth! . . . The dreams of men, the seed of commonwealths, the germs of empires.

For history is made with tools, not with ideas; and everything is changed by economic conditions - art, philosophy, love, virtue - truth itself!