Quotes About History

People make trouble, trouble makes history

I believe the universe wants to be noticed. I think the universe is inprobably biased toward the consciousness, that it rewards intelligence in part because the universe enjoys its elegance being observed. And who am I, living in the middle of history, to tell the universe that it-or my observation of it-is temporary?

The town was paper, but the memories were not.

The marks humans leave are too often scars.

I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going.

Tradition wears a snowy beard, romance is always young.

The great eventful Present hides the Past; but through the din Of its loud life hints and echoes from the life behind steal in.

Here Greek and Roman find themselves alive along these crowded shelves; and Shakespeare treads again his stage, and Chaucer paints anew his age.

We live in a world where amnesia is the most wished-for state. When did history become a bad word?

Ours is the only country deliberately founded on a good idea.

From her neck hung a magnificent jeweled pendant, the one she called "Great Harry," a gift from her father-in-law

which she valued so much that she later placed it with the Scottish crown jewels.

Darnley was the first to appear. He entered the supper room and spoke to Mary.

There is little to be gained from looking backward with disapproval at the consistency of human folly except to notice how each generation thinks itself immune to its predecessor's mistakes.

War is sometimes described as long periods of boredom punctuated by short moments of excitement. History is often similar, if rather safer.

History is above all else an argument. It is an argument between different historians; and, perhaps, an argument between the past and the present, an argument between what actually happened, and what is going to happen next. Arguments are important; they create the possibility of changing things.

The past itself is not a narrative. In its entirety, it is as chaotic, uncoordinated, and complex as life. History is about making sense of that mess, finding or creating patterns and meanings and stories from the maelstrom.

History up to the Renaissance had been something that one composed. History after the Renaissance, informed by methods for work and investigation, was increasingly something that one did.

If scientists could point to the fabulous interconnections of the natural world, historians should try to understand the past in a similarly intricate fashion.

all history in some ways wishes to say something about its own present time.

In many ways, history both begins and ends with questions; which is to say that it never really ends, but is a process.

history is to society what memory is to the individual.

History has a beginning in sources, but also in the gaps within and between sources.

Here the writer shows the progress and well-being of the line of Esau. He carefully notes that Esau is, in fact, "Edom." The repeated identification of Esau as Edom throughout the chapter prepares us for the future importance of Edom during Israel's later history.