Quotes About History

never in history, past or present, had an autocratic regime handed over power with so little upheaval or bloodshed.

A. J. P. Taylor who said that the historian's inevitable task is to decide whether something that happened in history was a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

One of the votes against war came from the very first woman ever to sit in the House of Representatives, Jeannette Rankin

The Progressive president was also a keen white supremacist and insisted on segregating the U.S. Army in the same way he had most of the federal government

The basic lesson of Indian history was already established. Material power like kingdoms, and kings, including Alexander the Great, comes and goes. But spiritual power, embodied in religion and caste and spiritual unity with Brahman, the changeless essence of the universe, lasts forever. Prime

Sedition Act," a rider to the Espionage Act. The Sedition Act, which Wilson signed on May 16, 1918, made it illegal to speak, print, write, or publish any "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the government, the Constitution, the military, or the flag—certainly the single most restrictive gag on free speech and freedom of the press in U.S. history.

The roots of a future war were planted that fateful spring; Wilson's failure to support Japan's highest aspirations would end with bombs dropped on Pearl Harbor.

This is the legacy of the African continent to the nations of the world," George James says in Stolen Legacy, which "laid the foundations of modern progress." Later, the Greeks and other whites managed to steal all these civilized skills from the African man, leaving him in darkness. When he heard this, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger asked skeptically, "How does one lose knowledge by sharing it?

History, people like to say, is written by the winners. The truth is, some of the most profound works on the past were written by those who considered themselves history's losers.

the Bolsheviks, less than 25 percent.

If Aristotle had been right and it was man's destiny to be free, if our nature as human beings makes us fit to govern our lives as we see fit, then why is it that everywhere we look human beings are unfree and submit to various forms of tyranny and slavery, including now in Florence? Why did freedom fail, not only in Florence but throughout history—even ancient Greece and Rome?

The Scottish Enlightenment presented man as the product of history. Our most fundamental character as human beings, they argued, even our moral character, is constantly evolving and developing, shaped by a variety of forces over which we as individuals have little or no control. We are ultimately creatures of our environment: that was the great discovery that the "Scottish school," as it came to be known, brought to the modern world.

Neither the Mensheviks nor the SRs made any protest at this clearly repressive political action—

History teaches us what human beings are like in reality rather than what we would like them to be. And when we deal with the sum total of history's record, high-minded ideals like those of Plato's Philosopher Rulers have to be pushed off over the side. Reality teaches a very different set of lessons about politics—and Machiavelli's ambition was to present them to posterity

two-thousand-year struggle for the soul of Western civilization, which today extends to all civilizations: a struggle born from an act of rebellion. It came around 360 BCE, when the young Aristotle, son of the court doctor of the Macedonian kings, turned against the ideas of his famous teacher, Plato of Athens, and set out to create a school of his own.

And every minute Newton didn't spend working on optics, physics, astronomy (including inventing the reflecting telescope), some harmless alchemy, and other sidebars of his mathematical discipline, he spent furtively studying the Bible and church history.

The intellectual tyranny that Newton had seen in the darkest chapters in the history of the medieval Church, he saw repeated in the tyranny of a godless, soulless science. He intended to correct that view and free men's minds for the future.

At dawn on May 25, 1453, the bells of Constantinople's churches rang out an urgent appeal.

Yet we should remember that the Covenanters were inspired less by their love of democracy than by their hatred of Satan.

You are only remembered and become famous because of your mistakes. —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

Nordau's theories gave a new twist to the question of how man's biological evolution and society's historical evolution intersected. A fourth and disturbing possibility now presented itself: even healthy human specimens living in advanced civilized society would, unless corrective steps were taken, degenerate into a lesser physical and moral type.

giving up his capacity to love and hate, to create and destroy. At the end of history, Kojève predicted, all the world will become America—a gloomy fate by any French measure.

As in old Edinburgh, drink opened the doors for free intellectual exchange. The

that famous motto that sits above Christopher Wren's tomb at Westminster Abbey... "If you seek his monument, look around you" - meaning London, 17th Century London. I think it's a motto that very much applies to the Scottish contribution to the modern World: that if you seek their monument, the Scots' monument, look around you.