Quotes About History

The Titanic somehow lowered the curtain on this way of living. It never was the same again. First the war, then the income tax, made sure of that.

Warum tötest du mich nicht?" fragte der Bücherjäger. "Du solltest eigentlich wissen", antwortete Homunkoloss, "daß es immer einen geben muß, der überlebt, damit er die Geschichte erzählen kann. Denn sonst gäbe es bald keine Geschichten mehr, um die Bücher zu füllen.

Der Ruhm mag schwinden, aber die Vergessenheit währt ewig.

The older you get the more you live in the past

The Aztecs invented the wheel, but didn't know how to use it except as a children's toy. Even though they built roads that to us scream out to have a wheel put on them, nonetheless they continued to drag things around. The society itself was blind to the possibilities.

America was living off the canned foods of art, the things held over from years before. It knew, vaguely, that there was fresh fruit, fresh meat on the tables of Paris, and it wanted its share.

Every intellectual product must be judged from the point of view of the age and the people in which it was produced.

No account of the Renaissance can be complete without some notice of the attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century to reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that's what Douglas MacArthur thought. When asked by a proper British gentlewoman if he had ever met the famous general, Dwight D. Eisenhower—himself about to march into history—supposedly replied, "Not only have I met him, ma'am; I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four years in the Philippines.

History is never antiquated, because humanity is always fundamentally the same.

futuro está almacenado en el pasado.

Christ was a member of the Essene group of Jews from Egypt. Were he alive today, he would suffer from racial discrimination.

Every great writer is a writer of history, let him treat on almost any subject he may.

Only rarely did violence directly lead to improvements, however temporary.

I cannot tell how the truth may be;I say the tale as 'twas said to me.

History is not going to be kind to liberals. With their mindless programs, they've managed to do to Black Americans what slavery, Reconstruction, and rank racism found impossible destroy their family and work ethic.

Maybe your college professor taught that the legacy of colonialism explains Third World poverty. That's nonsense as well. Canada was a colony. So were Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong. In fact, the richest country in the world, the United States, was once a colony. By contrast, Ethiopia, Liberia, Tibet, Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan were never colonies, but they are home to the world's poorest people.

The failure of churches to continue Jesus' struggle to overcome domination is one of the most damning apostasies in its history. With some thrilling exceptions, the churches of the world have never yet decided that domination is wrong.

History belongs to the intercessors - those who believe and pray the future into being.

Spanish encouraged racial intermarriage with the indigenous peoples of America. Anglo-Americans were usually intolerant of it. they were generally able to secure wives of English descent, whereas the Spanish American colonies were extremely unattractive to Spanish women.

If there had been no gold discovery, Oregon would probably have been ready for admission as a state before California was. The first transcontinental railroad might have been built to Oregon. But if California's first transcontinental railroad had been built later, it might have been in the hands of a somewhat less rapacious group of men, and it might have obtained less of a stranglehold on the state's economy and politics.

The value of the California crude oil produced in the decade of the 1920s was more than two and a half billion dollars. . . . the value of all the gold ever mined in the state — about two billion dollars.

Of this I am quite sure, that if we open a quarrel between the past and the present, we shall find that we have lost the future. Churchill, speech in the House of Commons (1940)

Were there atheists in foxholes during World War II? Of course, as can be verified by my dogtags . . . A veteran of Omaha Beach in 1944, I insisted upon including 'None' instead of P, C, or J as my religious affiliation.