Quotes About History

The rickshaw was invented by an American missionary, Jonathan Scobie, who first used it to wheel his invalid wife through the streets of Yokohama, Japan, in 1869.

we find among the Jews, as well as other nations, that men did sell themselves; but, it is plain, this was only to drudgery, not to slavery:

Whether there be any such moral principles, wherein all men do agree, I appeal to any who have been but moderately conversant in the history of mankind, and looked abroad beyond the smoke of their own chimneys.

You have a lot to learn, young man. Philosophy. Theology. Literature. Poetry. Drama. History. Archeology. Anthropology. Mythology. Music. These are your tools as much as brush and pigment. You cannot be an artist until you are civilized. You cannot be civilized until you learn. To be civilized is to know where you belong in the continuum of our art and your world. To surmount the past, you must know the past.

Influenza killed more people in a year than the Black Death of the Middle Ages killed in a century; it killed more people in twenty-four weeks than AIDS has killed in twenty-four years.

It was a skill useful to lawyers, and no man in all English history was more the lawyer than Coke. He personified a profession considered both so influential and so dubious that in 1372 the House of Commons had tried to bar lawyers from Parliament; little had changed when, in Coke's lifetime, Shakespeare wrote, "First, kill all the lawyers.

Getting the past wrong is almost as problematic as not getting the past into our minds at all.

To cut ourselves off from the past is to rob ourselves from understanding the present.

Throughout the history of our young nation, we have seen our military go bravely into battle, armed with courage and willing to make the ultimate sacrifice.

One of these photos stuck in my mind—that of elegant upper-class Parisians returning to the French capital after their armies had crushed the Paris Commune during Bloody Week (May 21–28, 1871). They applauded the terror organized by the French state, which had crushed Parisians aspiring to freedom.

Civilization: a thin veneer over barbarianism.

About seven hundred years ago, a pack of bandits arrived in central Italy, led by two brothers named Romulus and Remus. They despoiled the nearby peoples of land and women and set up their own little bandit state. At some point, Romulus established a fine old Roman tradition by murdering his brother. Had it been the other way around, I suppose we might now be living in a city named Reme.

When you think of how history is revealed, we know certain things to be facts at certain periods of time, which turn out not to be so factual as time marches on.

When personal computing finally blossomed in Silicon Valley in the mid-seventies, it did so largely without the benefit of any of the history and the research that had gone before it.

It's like the future is a building you put up on the foundations of the past.

In the West, the past is very close. In many places, it still believes it's the present.

Marxian Socialism must always remain a portent to the historians of opinion—how a doctrine so illogical and so dull can have exercised so powerful and enduring an influence over the minds of men, and, through them, the events of history.

A study of the history of opinion is a necessary preliminary to the emancipation of the mind.

In this autumn of 1919, in which I write, we are at the dead season of our fortunes.

The commonest virtues of the individual are often lacking in the spokesmen of nations; a statesman representing not himself but his country may prove, without incurring excessive blame—­as history often records—­vindictive, perfidious, and egotistic.

Americans Never Quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history. We Make History. -John McCain

The moral values and integrity of our nation, and the long, difficult, fraught history of our efforts to uphold them at home and abroad, are the test of every American generation. Will we act in this world with respect for our founding conviction that all people have equal dignity in the eyes of God and should be accorded the same respect by the laws and governments of men? That is the most important question history ever asks of us.

In human history, the desire for revenge and the desire for loot have often been closely associated.

In Flanders fields the poppies blowBetween the crosses, row on row.