Quotes About History

The upward course of a nation's history is due in the long run to the soundness of heart of its average men and women.

We lost the American colonies because we lacked the statesmanship to know the right time and the manner of yielding what is impossible to keep.

I'm not particularly in favor of doctrine or creed, ordination, the elevation of holy texts, the institution of church, or, for that matter, Christianity. Like most religions, it has irreconcilable shortcomings and an unforgivable history. What I do favor is the attempt to make sense of things by living within a story. The Christian story, for good or ill, is my inheritance.

Why do these big old country houses always have family portraits in the dining room? Do you really want to eat with someone's gloomy great-grandfather looking down on you?

People who read Taryn's book often quoted Heine: '"Where they have burned books at the end they will burn people." That's what your book is about,' he said. 'That's where its whole argument leads.

Uncle Nick was very sick—so sick—and he was very sad. So he chose to end his life with a gun." Once the trauma of the event passed, I made sure my son understood our family history and what options were available for those struggling with depression. Silence and mental illness are not a very effective combination.

Of the many species that have existed on earth--estimates run as high as fifty billion--more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error. more than a rounding error.

Everything (and everyone) alive today is descended from an organism that somehow survived the impact. But it does not follow from this that they (or we) are any better adapted. In times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning: how could a creature be adapted, either well or ill, for conditions it has never before encountered in its entire evolutionary history?

When all of these were considered together, a pattern emerged: mass extinctions seemed to take place at regular intervals of roughly twenty-six million years.

the planet has undergone change so wrenching that the diversity of life has plummeted. Five of these ancient events were catastrophic enough that they're put in their own category: the so-called Big Five. In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

on Easter Island concluded that it wasn't humans who deforested the landscape; rather, it was the rats

If you count people as an invasive species—the science writer Alan Burdick has called Homo sapiens "arguably the most successful invader in biological history"—the process goes back a hundred and twenty thousand years or so, to the period when modern humans first migrated out of Africa.

In what seems like a fantastic coincidence, but is probably no coincidence at all, the history of these events is recovered just as people come to realize that they are causing another one.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species's success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled "global change" that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth's history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.

How many people must have sailed out and vanished on the Pacific before you found Easter Island?

As best as can be determined, the world is now warmer than it has been at any point in the last two millennia, and, if current trends continue, by the end of the century it will likely be hotter than at any point in the last two million years.

the crisis Cuvier discerned just beyond the edge of recorded history was us.

Though it might be nice to imagine there once was a time when man lived in harmony with nature, it's not clear that he ever really did.

If Wake and Vredenburg were correct, then those of us alive today not only are witnessing one of the rarest events in life's history, we are also causing it.

It is believed that One Tree Island was created during a particularly vicious storm that occurred some four thousand years ago. (As one geologist who has studied the place put it to me, "You wouldn't have wanted to be there when that happened.")

9Among the many lessons that merge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.

buried the lede. Any event that has occurred just five times since the first animal with a backbone appeared, some five hundred million years ago, must qualify as exceedingly rare. The notion that a sixth such event would be taking place right now, more or less in front of our eyes, struck me as, to use the technical term, mind-boggling.

ICH BIN STOLZ, EIN NEANDERTHALER ZU SEIN

Among the many lessons that emerge from the geologic record, perhaps the most sobering is that in life, as in mutual funds, past performance is no guarantee of future results.