Quotes About History

Remember the old guy with the bell?

where are the snowdens of yesteryear?

Who is Spain? Why is Hitler? Where are the Snowdens of yesteryear?

His goading remained gentle. "Rome was destroyed, Greece was destroyed, Persia was destroyed, Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why not yours? How much longer do you really think your own country will last? Forever? Keep in mind that the earth itself is destined to be destroyed by the sun in twenty-five million years or so.

Adolf Hitler, who had done such a great job of combating un-American activities in Germany.

The real trick lies in losing wars, in knowing which wars can be lost. Italy has been losing wars for centuries, and just see how splendidly we've done nonetheless. France wins wars and is in a continual state of crisis. Germany loses and prospers.

Even people who were not there remembered vividly exactly what happened next.

Show me anything whereof it may be said, See, this is new, and I will show you it hath been.

But if insecurity was the primal source of Hamilton's incredibly energy, one would have to conclude that providence had conspired to produce at the most opportune moment perhaps the most creative liability in American history.

Hindsight history, sometimes call counterfactual history, is usually not history at all, but most often a condescending game of oneupmanship in which the living play political tricks on the dead, who are not around to defend themselves.

As far as his contemporaries were concerned, there was no question about his stature in American history. In the extravaganza of mourning that occurred in more than four hundred towns and hamlets throughout the land, he was described as the only indisputable hero of the age, the one and only "His Excellency.

Having now finished the work assigned me, Washington solemnly said, I retire from the great theatre of Action....I here offer my Commission, and take leave of all the enjoyments of public life. The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greatest exit in American history.

If he (John Adams) could not control events, he could at least record them for posterity – perhaps the ultimate form of control.

It is uncommon for the same men who make a revolution also to secure it.

The Constitution was intended less to resolve arguments than to make argument itself the solution. For judicial devotees of originalism or original intent, this should be a disarming insight, since it made the Constitution the foundation for an ever-shifting political dialogue that, like history itself, was an argument without end. Madison's original intention was to make all original intentions infinitely negotiable in the future.

When Jefferson visited Adams in England in the spring of 1786, the two former revolutionaries were presented at court and George III ostentatiously turned his back on them both. Neither man ever forgot the insult or the friend standing next to him when it happened.

the historian must be part hedgehog and part fox; that is, he must know "one big thing" and several "little things," must pursue a unifying vision while remaining sensitive to the peculiarities and the bedeviling varieties of his subject.

When the first American colonies were founded, William Bradford—Webster's distinguished ancestor—spelled the same word differently in the same sentence; his orthography and grammar were regarded as legitimate expressions of his personality.

The Adams presidency, in fact, might be the classic example of the historical truism that inherited circumstances define the parameters within which presidential leadership takes shape, that history shapes presidents, rather than vice versa.

Though we might wish otherwise, the history of what might have been is usually not really history at all, mixing together as it does the messy tangle of past experience with the clairvoyant certainty of our present preferences.

Keep in mind that the past is not history, but a much vaster region of the dead, gone, unknowable, or forgotten. History is what we choose to remember.

Having now finished the work assigned me," Washington solemnly said, "I retire from the great theatre of Action. . . . I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the enjoyments of public life." The man who had known how to stay the course now showed that he also understood how to leave it. Horses were waiting at the door immediately after Washington read his statement. The crowd gathered at the doorway to wave him off. It was the greatest exit in American history.

American literary culture proved to be less like an explosion that went off with the Revolution than a tender plant that required over fifty years of cultivation before it blossomed.

Fifty men have run America, and that's a high figure.