Quotes About History

And it came to me that these trees had been hardly smaller when I was yet unborn, and had stood as they stood now when I was a child playing among the cypresses and peaceful tombs of our necropolis, and that they would stand yet, drinking in the last light of the dying sun, even as now, when I had been dead as long as those who rested there.

There is no category of human activity in which the dead do not outnumber the living many times over. Most beautiful children are dead. Most soldiers, most cowards. The fairest women and the most learned men—all are dead.

A legend, a lie, and a likelihood make a tradition'?

our lives couldn't be viewed with detachment until they were half forgotten, like paintings which can be seen objectively only when the artists are long dead

The past stood at my shoulder, naked and defenseless as all dead things, as though it were time itself that had been laid open by the fall of the mountain.

Nations are like men—growing old, never young. My son had the misfortune to be a young man of an old nation.

We shut our eyes to the sky and the sea in the seventies—now in the nineties we open doors to a darker, nearer empire than either, the place that is between stones that touch, that has lived for fifty thousand years in the black guts of caves, for six thousand in the empty rooms of old houses; and one of the doors is the door in this wall of bricks.

The Aelf have struggled to free themselves from the monster called Kulili throughout their history. You are their last hope, and their best. I am not letting you out of my sight—no, not for ten thousand puking maidens.

Because there is no opportunity to act. It is always wise to talk a great deal, discussing what has been done and what may be done, when nothing can be done. All the great political movements of history were born in prisons.

The past cannot be found in the future where it is not

Of the trail of ink there is no end,'" Master Ultan told me. "Or so a wise man said. He lived long ago—what would he say if he could see us now? Another said, 'A man will give his life to the turning over of a collection of books,' but I would like to meet the man who could turn over this one, on any topic.

So it comes about that the war [World War I] seems, to us, to have been fought less over territory than the way it would be remembered, that the war's true subject is remembrance. Indeed the whole war — which was being remembered even as it was fought, whose fallen were being remembered before they fell — seems not so much to be tinted by retrospect as to have been fought retrospectively.

It is necessary to distinguish between history and fantasy wherever possible. And then use them against each other.

Designer of information superhighways need to take the occasional stroll down memory lane.

History suggests that we had very little hope until the social institutions of science arose. Before science, there was no apparent cumulative progress in the accuracy of human belief systems. After science, everything changed.

Single mothers may have been the norm during most of human evolution, as they were during the previous 50 million years of primate evolution.

But Hengist, hearing that Vortimer was dead, raised an army of not less than three hundred thousand men, and fitting out a fleet returned with them to Britain.

To understand a man, Napoleon said, you need to know how the world looked when he was twenty.

The only thing that we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history.

But even regarding History as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of States, and the virtue of individuals have been victimised — the question involuntarily arises — to what principle, to what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been offered.

History teaches us that man learns nothing from history.

The only Thought which Philosophy brings with it to the contemplation of History, is the simple conception of Reason; that Reason is the Sovereign of the World; that the history of the world, therefore, presents us with a rational process.

The march of GOD in the world, that is what the state is.

It is this final goal - freedom - toward which all the world's history has been working. It is this goal to which all the sacrifices have been brought upon the broad altar of the earth in the long flow of time.