Quotes About History

The Roman historian Plutarch estimated that the civilized Romans under Julius Caesar, in his decade-long campaign in Gaul, destroyed 800 towns and villages and enslaved 3 million people.

Take the tail of the female tuna—and I'm talking of the large female tuna whose mother city is Byzantium.

Writing beautifully—calligraphy—was China's first graphic art form. Although elsewhere in the world people drew first and learned to write later, in China, the reverse was true. First you learned to write beautifully, and then you painted. After mastering those twin skills, you could move on to writing poetry, but many chose to remain just calligraphers, a highly appreciated art form in China. Another

And another small point, or two actually; Aldus was the first to use the modern semicolon.

history's greatest lessons is that once the state embraces a religion, the nature of that religion changes radically. It loses its nonviolent component

In eighteenth-century England, anchovy sauce became known as ketchup, katchup, or catsup.

One result of the tea boycott was that Americans very quickly became coffee drinkers.

In Middle English, cod meant a bag or a sack, or by inference, a scrotum, which is why the outrageous purse that sixteenth-century men wore at their crotch to give the appearance of enormous and decorative genitals was called a codpiece.

At times soldiers were even paid in salt, which was the origin of the word salary and the expression "worth his salt" or "earning his salt." In fact, the Latin word sal became the French word solde, meaning pay, which is the origin of the word, soldier.

Europeans started wearing linen underwear instead of wool. There is no record indicating that this made the Europeans less irritable, but it did make a lot more rags available.

General Motors, ITT, and Ford come most readily to mind as having plants protected by Hitler

Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer

Anthimus's pronouncement on garum has echoed through Western cooking: "Nam liquamen ex omni parte prohibemus," We ban the use of garum from every culinary role.

The guardians of Celtic culture, the Druids, did not leave written records. So most of what we know of them is from Greek and Roman historians who described the Celts as huge and terrifying men in bright fabrics.

The only thing New Yorkers ignore more than nature is history. They have a habit of not spending a great deal of time pondering the history of their city. That is because of a sense that it has always been more or less the same, or, as Edmund Wilson, one of the more venerated New Yorker writers of that magazine's heyday, explained his waning enthusiasm for reading history in his old age, "I know more or less the kind of things that happen.

THE ROMANS SALTED their greens, believing this to counteract the natural bitterness, which is the origin of the word salad, salted. The

Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history. Georges Pompidou

Cherokee faction of fewer than 500 people in a nation of 17,000 who were agreeable to removal.

It is a sad fate for a people to be defined for posterity by their enemies.

Mark Kurlansky

The oldest-known permanent photograph, an image of a man leading a horse, dates from 1825.

the Poor Men of Lyons

By 1937, every British trawler had a wireless, electricity, and an echometer - the forerunner of sonar. If getting into fishing had required the kind of capital in past centuries that it cost in the twentieth century, cod would never have built a nation of middle-class, self-made entrepreneurs in New England.

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why