Quotes About History

Yesterday was July the Fourth, which used to be Independence Day, before they abolished it.

For every year of peace there have been four hundred years of war.

How soon before there are ancient texts they feel they have to obey but have forgotten how to interpret?

The television series has respected one of the axioms of the novel: no event is allowed into it that does not have a precedent in human history.

It was a wicked game. "Homer," says Snowman, making his way through the dripping-wet vegetation. "The Divine Comedy. Greek statuary. Aqueducts. Paradise Lost. Mozart's music. Shakespeare, complete works. The Brontës. Tolstoy. The Pearl Mosque. Chartres Cathedral. Bach. Rembrandt. Verdi. Joyce. Penicillin. Keats. Turner. Heart transplants. Polio vaccine. Berlioz. Baudelaire. Bartok. Yeats. Woolf.

most people prefer a past is which nothing smells.

A movie about the past is not the same as the past.

What was the rationale for all this pillaging? Souvenirs. These people needed something to remember themselves by. An odd thing, souvenir-hunting: now becomes then even while it is still now. You don't really believe you're there, and so you nick the proof, or something you mistake for it.

Stick a shovel into the ground almost anywhere and some horrible thing or other will come to light. Good for the trade, we thrive on bones; without them there'd be no stories.

The collective memory is notoriously faulty, and much of the past sinks into the ocean of time to be drowned forever; but once in a while the waters part, allowing us to glimpse a flash of hidden treasure, if only for a moment.

The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread.

As for you, she'd say to me, you're just a backlash. Flash in the pan. History will absolve me. But

History, as I recall, was never this winsome, and especially not this clean, but the real thing would never sell: most people prefer a past in which nothing smells.

The tide of human desire, the desire for more and better, would overwhelm them. It would take control and drive events, as it had in every large change throughout history.

All this is pure speculation. I don't really know what men used to say. I had only their words for it.

In the old days, trouble was kept in the family, which is still the best place for it, not that there's ever a best place for trouble. Why stir everything up again after that many years, with all concerned tucked, like tired children, so neatly into their graves?

Because we have no history I construct one for you making use of what there is, parts of other people's lives, paragraphs I invent, now and then an object, a watch, a picture you claim as yours

For a whole month they'd had to play Barbarian Stomp (See If You Can Change History!). One side had the cities and the riches and the other side had the hordes, and – usually but not always – the most viciousness. Either the barbarians stomped the cities or else they got stomped, but you had to start out with the historical disposition of energies and go on from there.

WITHOUT MEMORY, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt.

This is a pattern humankind has repeated many times over the course of its history. When there is a crisis, whether real or imagined, culprits—whether real or imagined—must be found and eliminated.

These words are yours, though you never said them, you never heard them, history breeds death but if you kill it you kill yourself.

Everything is post these days, as if we're all just a footnote to something earlier that was real enough to have a name of its own.

Everything in this town is retro, which accounts for the large supply of black vintage items in Accessories. The past is so much safer, because whatever's in it has already happened. It can't be changed; so, in a way, there's nothing to dread. She

For so much time, our history was written in bones only.