Quotes About History

The historical pessimist worries that his own society is about to destroy itself, the cultural pessimist concludes that it deserves to be destroyed.

Italy's cities had been left largely to govern themselves since the Dark Ages.

The coming of the Crusades had made them rich as well as independent

By the time of the Great Schism, Italy had descended back into gangster politics, as in the days of Caesar and Pompey.

The study of history is Ã¢â'¬Â¦ the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of Fortune. —Polybius (200–118 BCE)

More than any previous work, Galileo's Dialogue showed that if Copernicus wasn't right on every detail of the working of the solar system, Aristotle and Ptolemy were both very clearly wrong. The first printing sold out almost at once.

The lesson Scott taught the modern world was that the past does not have to die or vanish: it can live on, in a nation's memory, and help to nourish its posterity.

Susan Sontag did in 1967, that "the truth is that Mozart, Pascal, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, the emancipation of women … don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought on the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

In 1210, it issued its first condemnation of Averroës and his disciples in the West; for good measure, it extended the ban to the works of Aristotle. It was already too late. Just fifteen years after the ban was issued, Aristotle's greatest medieval expositor was born. To his family and neighbors, he was Tommaso D'Aquino. To history, he is Saint Thomas Aquinas, the single greatest creative mind of the Middle Ages.

The humanist education that Erasmus and his friends invented wound up creating its own schools. One of the first was St. Paul's in London, founded by John Colet.

As for Chartres's famous flying buttresses, the first ever constructed, they were built to relieve stress on the cathedral's walls, so that windows could be available for yards and yards of glittering stained glass.

Greek science on Aristotle's terms, which had already fallen into decrepitude under the late Roman Empire, will take a long hiatus during the Middle Ages.

In a purely technical sense, Sens Cathedral is probably the first Gothic church. When Abelard and Bernard met there in the spring of 1140, they probably did not notice that an architectural revolution was taking place over their heads. Its builders pioneered many of the characteristic elements of the Gothic style, from ribbed interior vaults and a three-part elevation, to the famous pointed Gothic arch for its windows.

Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, might imply. Contemporaries viewed him with awe as the last Roman. We can think of him as the first medieval man, and the man who reintroduced Aristotle to the West. Boethius was born fifty years after Augustine's death

The possibility that popular participation and growing material affluence might serve as a barrier to the growth of the totalitarian state never occurred to Burckhardt. Instead, he concluded, "I know too much history to expect anything from the despotism of the masses except tyranny, which will be the end of history.

Even the name is not his real one. His given name was Aristocles. Plato, from the Greek for "wide" or "broad," was probably a family nickname.

Some states banned the teaching of German in private and public schools alike.

Strato's arrival in that thriving port city was a landmark event in the history of Greek science. At one stroke Strato was leaving Athens, the ancient city of philosophers, intellectuals, and cosmopolitan aristocrats, for Alexandria, a new city of international businessmen, mathematicians, and engineers.

South Dakota even prohibited the use of the German language over the telephone.

harassment of individual German Americans became commonplace.

Beyond the actual words of God, and underneath the literal narrative of law, history, and even geography, Origen could discern timeless truths waiting to be pointed out and explained. This way of reading the Bible, called exegesis, would become standard during the Middle Ages. Indeed, the Middle Ages came to interpret just about everything morally, symbolically, or allegorically and sometimes all three.

They relativized man, in the sense that they made who we are dependent to some degree on our experience in a particular time and place, rather than solely on some inborn quality or sense.

From the fourth-biggest military force in the world in 1918, the United States Army shrank to number eighteen, just ahead of tiny Holland.

The two came to differ on many, if not most, issues. But the man who would single-handedly defy Hitler in 1940 against all odds bears a striking resemblance to the man who organized the first satyagraha campaign in South Africa.