Quotes About History

Myth, the smoke of history, is seen to signal new and more relevant meanings when espied from the distance of later millennia.

Historically it was Europe, not India, which consistently made religion grounds for war and the state an instrument of persecution.

Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana survive in several versions, the earliest of which are at least five hundred years later than the Vedas. Yet their core narratives seem to relate to events from a period prior to all but the Rig Veda.

the ancient Persians had indeed used their arya word in an ethnic sense; they called themselves the 'Ariana' (whence derives the modern 'Iran').

The Islam of the 18th, 19th and first half of the 20th century was a poor thing. Nobody bothered about it. Islam was that funny sort of pure system of beliefs that depressed people in the Middle East held as their religion.

Nothing is so admirable in politics as a short memory.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

NEGRO Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamednot by its residentsAfrica. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

The ICF and Under Fives mean more around Upton Park than Ron and Reggie Kray. History stays around for years. But who cares about names.

Chinese communism lies the world's longest tradition of successful autocracy.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him. It is the moment when his emotions achieve their most powerful sway over him, and afterward when you say to this person "the world today" or "life" or "reality" he will assume that you mean this moment, even if it is fifty years past. The world, through his unleashed emotions, imprinted itself upon him, and he carries the stamp of that passing moment forever.

Everyone has a moment in history which belongs particularly to him.

The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment [Regimen] of Women.

till that it pleased God of his great mercy, in the year of God 1527, to raise up his servand, Maister Patrik Hammyltoun, at whome our Hystorie doith begyn.

The past is a foreign country, and we're only tourists. We can't expect to understand the locals, or why they do what they do.

vellichor n. the strange wistfulness of used bookstores, which are somehow infused with the passage of time—filled with thousands of old books you'll never have time to read, each of which is itself locked in its own era, bound and dated and papered over like an old room the author abandoned years ago, a hidden annex littered with thoughts left just as they were on the day they were captured.

Fei Xiaoton, the University of Chicago - trained Chinese sociologist, once observed, this nation is "a land without ghosts," a place where people are so busy with promises of progress that they have forgotten where they come from and who their ancestors were...

Deeds, not stones, are the true monuments of the great.

There weren't any astronauts until I was about 10. Yuri Gagarin went into space right around my 10th birthday.

ANDERSONVILLE DIARY JOHN H. RANSOM, LATE FIRST SERGEANT NINTH MICH. CAV., AUTHOR AND PUBLISHER, 1881

A clear look back on the Cold War's battlegrounds, along with a sense of relief that the world survived forty-five years of confrontation, evokes feelings of humility and regret.

It might now be the occasion to remember that for the Romans, a barbarian was someone who wore trousers, had a beard and ate butter.)

Humans make their own history, but not under circumstances of their choosing.

was written before it became too embarrassing for the Republican party to hold its 1972 convention in San Diego, and I preferred not to follow the convention to Miami Beach.