Quotes About History

Beware of nature's show-offs: the banded krait, the scarlet scorpion, the beautiful belladonna, the ink-squirting octopus. Even so, history shows human beings to be the most dangerous of nature's show-offs. Inimical to each other, given over to greed and insatiable appetites. Nature strikes when roused; man, out of habit and a perverse nature.

The past is always with us, for it feeds the present.

Despite his explicit and repeated disavowal of anti-Semitism, LaHaye has made odd comments about Jews, saying to Slate.com journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, "Some of the greatest evil in the history of the world was concocted in the Jewish mind.

Man seeks objectives that enable him to convert the attainment of every goal into a means for the attainment of a new and more desirable goal. The ultimate objective in such a sequence cannot be obtainable; otherwise its attainment would put an end to the process. An end that satisfies these conditions is an ideal… Thus the formulation and pursuit of ideals is a means by which to put meaning and significance into his life and into the history of which he is part.

Few expected very much of Franklin Roosevelt on Inauguration Day in 1933. Like Barack Obama seventy-six years later, he was succeeding a failed Republican president, and Americans had voted for change. What that change might be Roosevelt never clearly said, probably because he himself didn't know.

A day spent praising the earth and lamenting man's pollutionist history makes you feel like a superior, sensitive soul.

Children rarely want to know who their parents were before they were parents, and when age finally stirs their curiosity, there is no parent left to tell them.

Rereading A.J. Liebling carries me happily back to an age when all good journalists knew they had plenty to be modest about, and were.

My major allegiance has been to storytelling, not to history.

The received truth of history is shot through and falsified by unknown secrets carried to the grave.

Germany was an ambitious young nation.

In the first days of mobilization there was of course a lot of enthusiasm," recalled Robert Poustis, who was a French student at the time.

If the past cannot teach the present and the father cannot teach the son, then history need not have bothered to go on, and the world has wasted a great deal of time.

He was thinking what a long and wide thing time is, to have so many happenings in it.

In America, the Federal Constitution has endured as the most sagacious conservative document in political history

The bungalow had more to do with how Americans live today than any other building that has gone remotely by the name of architecture in our history.

Foolishly perhaps, but determined none the less, I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed. That goal is the real goal as far as I am concerned…

There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might "go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation").

Manhattan is where America began.

There was actually a time when people wanted to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt as to his intentions (in 1935, Winston Churchill thought it possible that Hitler might 'go down in history as the man who restored honour and peace of mind to the Great Germanic nation').

The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and

Henry Hudson was in his forties when he stepped into the light of history, a seasoned mariner, a man with a strong and resourceful wife and three sons, a man born and raised not only to the sea but to the quest for a northern passage to Asia, who, weaned from infancy on the legends of his predecessors, probably couldn't help but be obsessed by it.

It was the Dutch of this era who invented the idea of the home as a personal, intimate space; one might say they invented coziness.

Collecting, especially of the classifying sort epitomized by stamp collecting, offered a means to seem to gain control of the world and of the past.