Quotes About History

So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy. You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable.

The key to Hadrian's behaviour, and to the subsequent integration of a style of rule, may be found in his relationship with the past. He was a broadly read man and a passionate, if nostalgic, historian, and the innovations of his reign as well as the strategies he adopted to consolidate power were all consistent with his pervasive sense of the past. His own immediate experience, infused with a broad knowledge of Mediterranean history, shaped the future of his empire.

Of the twelve Caesars of the first century CE, six were bloodily assassinated, or were forced to commit suicide, at least two of them in their own palaces in Rome. A further three were the subject of lurid posthumous rumours as to the manner of their deaths, and of the remaining three, only one ruled for more than two years.

History and speculation have placed Antinous at Hadrian's side as the one great attachment of the emperor's life, the loss of whom caused this mature, sophisticated and highly experienced ruler to allow himself to be subsumed by grief.

Greeks were so much a part of the Roman world that, in the surviving texts, they are often more visible by the shadow they cast than by their actual written presence.

Today, without its exotic carapace, the exterior is a reddish brick within which the arches and buttresses that made such a feat of engineering possible are clearly visible. They have their own beauty; through such structural expertise the Pantheon has been in constant use for 1,875 years.

If a man were called to fix the period in the history of the world, during which the condition of the race were most happy and most prosperous, he would, without hesitation, name that which elapsed from the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus.

Caligula, trapped leaving the games, was run through by noblemen who then hacked at his genitals and in their ferocity may even, according to Cassius Dio, have gorged themselves on his flesh. His wife, one of the few people Caligula loved, was murdered on the spot and his infant daughter, so a narrative of chilling verisimilitude relates, was picked up by the feet and had her brains dashed out against a wall.

The reign of Domitian lasted for fifteen years from 81 CE, when Hadrian was a child of five, until 96, when he was a serving officer in the Roman legions aged twenty; thus it formed the backdrop to Hadrian's experience of imperial life.

He built public buildings in all places and without number, but he inscribed his own name on none of them except the temple of his father Trajan. At Rome he restored the Pantheon, the voting enclosure, the Basilica of Neptune, very many Temples, the forum of Augustus, the baths of Agrippa . . . Also he constructed the bridge named after himself, a tomb on the bank of the Tiber and the temple of the Bona Dea.

I kept thinking how the five of us had had a really unhealthy family, but I saw then too how our roots were twisted so tenaciously around one another's hearts.

William's life rumbled over, like a train on loose tracks: the images from Dachau that would not leave his brain after he had gone there with me so many years ago. He had been petrified by what he saw there in Germany. He must have been

But we are all mythologies

I could not believe how Black Hawk was taken on a tour of cities after his capture. I read his autobiography as soon as I could. And I remembered the line he said: "How smooth must be the language of the whites, when they can make right look like wrong, and wrong like right.

Nothing is long ago.

It is with nations as it is with individuals. A book of history is a book of sermons.

There is a single thread of attitude, a single direction of flow, that joins our present time to its early burgeoning in Mediterranean civilization.

Roman civilization had achieved, within the bounds of its technology, relatively as great a mastery of time and space as we have achieved today.

Western history has been a history of deed done, actions performed and results achieved.

What is the thread of western civilization that distinguished its course in history? It has to do with the preoccupation of western man with his outward command and his sense of superiority.

When I began writing that I was able and did travel and met some fascinating people and also uncovered some history, which has not been discovered before.

Whatever we do or fail to do will influence the course of history.

The more the history of the World War and what led up to it is studied, the more clearly those tragic years become revealed as a vast collapse of civilization.

Those nations have a very great responsibility at this juncture of the world's affairs, for by throwing their joint weight into the scales of history on the right side, they may tip the balance decisively in favour of peace.