Quotes About History

Who cares? Kingdoms rise and fall. Just don't burn the paintings in the Louvre, that's all.

History is a litany of injustice, no one denies it. But when has a simple solution ever been anything but evil? Only in complexity do we find answers. Through complexity men struggle towards fairness; it is slow and clumsy, but it's the only way. Simplicity demands too great a sacrifice. It always has. - Lestat

Don't let the old story repeat itself now. Arm yourself with all that's happened.

Look on the effect of your religions, those movements that have swept up millions with their fantastical claims. Look at what they have done to human history. Look at the wars fought on account of them; look at the persecutions, the massacres. Look at the pure enslavement of reason; look at the price of faith and zeal.

Roman influence seeds itself, sprouting mighty oaks right through the modern forest of computers, digital disks, microviruses and space satellites.

Genealogy belongs to the rich in human history. The poor rise and fall without leaving a footprint.

Hauntings only repeat what occurred once upon a time.

It was because historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny-and his was, of course, a lie.

It's always been pride. The History of the Mayfair Witches was pride. But this came to me wrapped in the mysteries of science. We have such a terrible, terrible misconception of science. We think it involves the definite, the precise, the known; it is a horrid series of gates to an unknown as vast as the universe; which means endless. And I knew this, I knew but I forgot. That was my mistake.

Traditions are seldom lies; traditions reflect people's deepest beliefs and customs. They have their own truth

we are the sum of all we've seen and all we've appreciated and understood. You were the sum of sunshine on marble floors filled with pictures of divine beings who laughed and loved and drank the fruit of the vine as surely as you were the sum of the poets and historians and philosophers you'd read. You were the sum and the fount of what you'd cherished and chosen to abide and all you had loved.

And it is a great fact of history that the most mediocre and well-meaning imbeciles can strike down the mighty with surprising effectiveness when there is such a huge disparity of souls.

Of course all that these young bourgeois really wanted was to be aristocrats. They bought titles, married into aristocratic families whenever they could. And it's one of the little jokes of history that they got mixed up in the Revolution, and helped to abolish the class which in fact they really wanted to join.

What had really given birth to the Romantic Movement in the history of human ideas was affluence—an increase in the number of people who had plenty enough to eat, enough education to read and write, and time to ruminate on their own personal emotions.

Everyone today has a story; the world's an archive.

Apparently each century yields a new kind of vampire, or let us say that our course of growth was not set in the beginning any more than the course of human beings.

Can't always be the living legend."-Louis

Christmas celebrations in the early colonies to the condemnations today of the commercial nature of the feast.

Z ponurych proroków wieków minionych nowy wiek uczyniÅ' gÅ'upców

I'd known for a long time why I loved history. It was because the historians made it sound so coherent, so purposeful, so complete. They'd take an entire century and impose a meaning on it, a personality, a destiny—and this was, of course, a lie.

The entire history of evil in this world is related to what human beings do to one another in order to survive.

She found herself staring at a tintype, a late-nineteenth-century photograph.

Civilizations rise and fall, my friend,' I said. Old gods give way to new ones.

Ah, yes, beautiful English bones.