Quotes About History

It bears repeating that no case has yet been reported where the alien abduction story masked another kind of traumatic experience. The reverse, however, has frequently been noted, including in my case experience – i.e. that a client presenting with a complaint of possible sexual abuse or trauma has discovered a history of alien abduction experiences, even when being treated by a therapist unfamiliar with the phenomenon and certainly not expecting that an abduction story would emerge.

The title of my book is 'American Histories,' plural. And as far as I'm concerned, my reading of history is it is a sort of nightmare. It is a sort of nightmare, and I'm trying to wake up from it. And as any nightmare, it's full of much that is unspeakable.

Sociopath" and "psycho" were two of the most common field diagnoses for my look and expression. I heard it all the time: "I've read about people like you. They have no expression because they have no feeling. Some of the worst murderers in history were sociopaths.

His naivety was of the sort that Descartes no doubt had in mind when he concluded that the study of history, like travel, while harmless enough as a form of entertainment – one composed of 'memorable events' which might conceivably 'elevate the mind' or 'help to form the judgement' – was hardly an occupation for anyone seriously concerned with increasing knowledge.

Our treatment of Indians . . . still affects the national consciousness... It seems a basic requirement to study the history of Indian people. Only through this study can we as a nation do what must be done if our treatment of the American Indian is not to be marked down for all time as a national disgrace.

The complacent, the self-indulgent, the soft societies are about to be swept away with the debris of history.

We dare not forget that we are the heirs of that first revolution.

Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined together, let no man put asunder.

History is a relentless master. It has no present, only the past rushing into the future. To try to hold fast is to be swept aside.

We would like to live as we once lived, but history will not permit it.

Mughal success was the product of hard-driving, active rulership exercised by extremely capable rulers who acted as their own chief executives.

The musket made the infantryman and the infantryman made the democrat.

David Williamson's Pennsylvania militia brought Clark's dismaying vision to life in 1782 at Gnadenhutten when they herded nearly ninety Christianized Delaware Indians into two cabins and systematically beat them to death.

The enormous bloodlettings that nations visited on one another in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries would surely convince all but the lunatic that appeals to motherland and fatherland had no place in a modern society.

Goldsboro, North Carolina.

Fame had been democratized. During most of history only members of the privileged classes had possessed a realistic opportunity to achieve majestic fame, but in the eighteenth century it has been demonstrated repeatedly, by men such as Franklin, for instance, that fame might be achieved by men born into a lesser social rank.

Some 2,500 of Washington's Continentals perished that winter, roughly one in five of those who had entered Valley Forge just before Christmas. (In contrast, one in thirty American soldiers died in combat in the Battle of the Bulge, one of the nation's costliest engagements in World War II.)

He also embraced a cyclical theory of history. History, he believed, flowed in cycles. Infant nations were virtuous and uncorrupted, but with age they grew tainted, eventually falling into decline and succumbing to their encumbering maladies and vices.

One thing is certain, however; whereas it has been almost commonplace among historians to attribute Adams's opposition to Franklin's style of diplomacy to simple jealousy, in fact Adams also was critical of his fellow envoy because of a genuine concern that America might be ruined by anything less than a wary, coequal, unbending relationship with its new ally.38

Jefferson subsequently came to believe that Henry's speech attacking the Stamp Act had been "the dawn of the Revolution."36

Independence may have been declared in 1776, but it still had to be won. Years of bloody warfare followed. The death toll was staggering, for soldiers and noncombatants. Of all the wars in the history of the United States, only the Civil War witnessed a greater percentage of deaths among those who soldiered. The ratio of

Pointing out the possible, and expensive, entanglements that could come with widespread commercial enterprise, the author calculates the Great Britain was at war half the time between 1689 and 1783.

While a British band allegedly played a march tune, "The World Turned Upside Down," 7241 British soldiers surrendered their arms.

We shall be inclined to pronounce the voyage that led to the way to this New World as the most epoch-making event of all that have occurred since the birth of Christ.