Quotes About History

Wars never end warfare, they lay the groundwork for the next.

is significant that the first attempt to build a refrigerator in the United States was undertaken for keeping butter (as opposed to what happened in Australia, where in 1853 James Harrison, a Scot who had moved there, developed the first really fully functional refrigerator and used it for chilling beer).

Ketchup became a tomato sauce, originally called "tomato ketchup" in America, which is appropriate since the tomato is an American plant, brought to Europe by Hernán Cortés, embraced in the Mediterranean, and regarded with great suspicion in the North. The

the four great inventions—paper, compass, gunpowder, and printing

Often the inventor that history remembers is not the true inventor, but the one who made the idea commercially successful. Thomas Edison didn't invent the lightbulb either.

Mennonites are so called because they followed Menno Simons, a sixteenth-century Dutch Catholic priest

Thirty Years War

THE ROMANS PAID homage to democracy, the rights of the common citizen and, for a time, republicanism. But

Romans often took family names from agriculture, Cato

MORE THAN A gastronomic development, the salting of fowl and especially of fish was an important step in the development of economies.

Parchment and papyrus documents could be easily altered, but paper documents could not.

homes. Syracuse, chosen as the best route for canals, had been an undeveloped swampy lowland. Colonel William L. Stone, passing through in 1820 when the Syracuse population was 250 people, wrote, "It was so desolate it would make an owl weep to fly over it.

And so you have more opportunities and more responsibilities than any other generation in history.

AFTER THE FALL of Rome in the fifth century, garum was often thought of as just one of the unpleasant hedonistic excesses for which Rome was remembered. Leaving fish organs in the sun to rot was not an idea that endured in less extravagant cultures. Of course when garum was made properly, the salt prevented rotting until the fermentation took hold. But it became increasingly difficult to convince people of this.

History teaches over and over again that a conflict between a violent and a nonviolent force is a moral argument. The lesson is that if the nonviolent side can be led to violence, they have lost the argument and they are destroyed.

So even Cicero imagined moveable type, but only in his polemic as an absurd idea. He used the phrase formae literarum, and when moveable type was finally made some sixteen centuries later, that is the name they gave it—though it was not such an absurd idea after all.

teabag paper is not made from wood pulp but from the stalk of abaca, a banana-like plant grown in the Philippines. Abaca was first used as a paper source at the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Mütter Museum

Within that single fifteen-month period—perhaps the most creative in American literary history—Grant would not only write his Personal Memoirs, Twain would reach the peak of his career with the publication of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Those two books, perhaps the finest work of American nonfiction ever written and the greatest of all American novels, defined their legacy.

And I think a long time ago there were big stories. Stories so big you could live your whole life in them. The Powerful Hands of the Gods and Fate. The Journey to Enlightenment. The March of Socialism. But they all died or the world grew up or grew senile or forgot them, so now we're making up our own stories. Little stories. But we've each got one.

Learn the lessons of history. Don't let how you feel about your tenure at your organization drive you to make poor investment decisions that could potentially derail a successful retirement.

The United States has the most powerful government, with the longest reach, of any nation in history. It is also the Brokest Nation in History. Resolving that contradiction is unlikely to be pretty.

The Clinton presidency has at last stumbled on its rendezvous with history: While Ronald Reagan and George Bush presided over the fall of Communism, Mr. Clinton presides over the rise of Viagra. It may not be true that any young boy can grow up to be president. But at least, thanks to Viagra, any young boy can grow up to be this president.

No Islamic nation could have flown to the moon or invented the Internet, simply because for a millennium the culture has suppressed the curiosity necessary for such a venture.