Quotes about History

To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant.

Asleep in lap of legends old.

Till that it pleased God of his great mercy, in the year of God 1527, to raise up his servand, Maister Patrik Hammyltoun, at whome our Hystorie doith begyn.

Getting the past wrong is almost as problematic as not getting the past into our minds at all.

To cut ourselves off from the past is to rob ourselves from understanding the present.

His expression was suddenly serious as the tip of his finger traced her lips. "I never understood why history is filled with stories of men who waged wars over a woman they loved. There are many women in the world, and it was beyond my grasp what made one woman special enough to go to such extremes." He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Now I understand.

Newspapers are the second hand of history. This hand, however, is usually not only of inferior metal to the other hands, it also seldom works properly.

Is there not in these words of our Lord a latent reference to the history of man's fall, and a designed contrast from the first tree? Just as by the act of "eating" man lost his spiritual life, so by an act of "eating" man now obtains spiritual and eternal life!

The novelties of one generation are only the resuscitated fashions of the generation before last.

But I will now go further, and confess to you that men get tired of everything, of heaven no less than of hell; and that all history is nothing but a record of the oscillations of the world between these two extremes. An epoch is but a swing of the pendulum; and each generation thinks the world is progressing because it is always moving.

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class." "There is correct English: that is not slang." "I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.