Quotes About History

Summer grasses: all that remains of great soldiers' imperial dreams

It is merely an accident of history that it is considered normal in our society to believe that the Creator of the universe can hear your thoughts while it is demonstrative of mental illness to believe that he is communicating with you by having the rain tap in Morse code on your bedroom window.

For the next seven decades the story of Smith attending these sixty-three consecutive shows has been repeated often, including by me. The trouble is, Mexicana was performed only thirty-five times.

While men tend to think in abstractions—rules, principles, information, definitions—women tend to see the world in terms of relationships. Where men tend to define, distinguish, and divide, women often seek to bring unity and healing. Head and heart, reason and emotion, masculine and femininity—these are all complementary aspects of humanity. A tragedy of history is that, so often, the male voice has drowned out the female voice altogether.

Woodrow Wilson claimed that history endows us with the "invaluable mental power we call judgment.

Just as math is more than a collection of theorems, history is more than a collection of facts. It's an intellectual enterprise that requires piecing together a cogent and accurate story from partial scraps of faded words. And the process never ends. Its destination leads to a new beginning. True historical inquiry must end where it begins: with a question mark.

The study of history should be a mind-altering encounter that leaves one forever unable to consider the social world without asking questions about where a claim comes from, who's making it, and how time and place shape human behavior.

History holds up one side of our lives and fiction the other.

The United Staes had never in its history intervened to stop genocide and had in fact rarely even made a point of condemning it as it occurred

To paraphrase Walter Laqueur, a pioneer in the study of the Allies' response to the Holocaust, although many people thought that the Jews were no longer alive, they did not necessarily believe they were dead.18

It has been argued that close attention to the history of science is indispensable for doing good philosophy of science.

She gained fame in 1895 when she became the third woman to scale the Matterhorn—and the second to do so in trousers, at a time when women could be arrested for wearing them in public.

Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There was never a democracy that did not commit suicide.

The history of the world is the record of the weakness, frailty and death of public opinion.

It has been said that although God cannot alter the past, historians can --it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

If a person would understand either the Odyssey or any other ancient work, he must never look at the dead without seeing the living in them, nor at the living without thinking of the dead. We are too fond of seeing the ancients as one thing and the moderns as another.

It has been said that though God cannot alter the past, historians can; it is perhaps because they can be useful to Him in this respect that He tolerates their existence.

The venerable dead are waiting in my library to entertain me and relieve me from the nonsense of surviving mortals.

We are Republicans, and don't propose to leave our party and identify ourselves with the party whose antecedents have been Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion.

In any case, his judgment and set of values, acting alone or through his assistants, determine not only what is gold and what is dross but the design of the history which he creates out of the metal. The historian decides what is significant, and what is not.

America was discovered accidentally by a great seaman who was looking for something else; when discovered it was not wanted; and most of the exploration for the next fifty years was done in the hope of getting through or around it. America was named after a man who discovered no part of the New World. History is like that, very chancy.

Don't worry about the war. It's all over but the shooting.

What a lucky thing the wheel was invented before the automobile; otherwise can you imagine the awful screeching?

I am always sorry when any language is lost, because languages are the pedigree of nations