"In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without."

History, Conquest, Revolution, Years

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"In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without."

Exlpore more History quotes

"History is only the register of crimes and misfortunes."

Voltaire, French Writer

History,

"There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse."

Cormac McCarthy, American Writer

History, Violence, War, Death, Suffering

"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

History, Men, Women, Opposition

"Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years."

Henry David Thoreau, American Author

History, Printing, Years

"The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities."

Susan Sontag, American Author

History, Exhaustion, Man, Possibilities

"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."

William Faulkner, American Novelist

History, Letters, People, Blood, Passion

"The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much."

Joseph Conrad, Polish Novelist

History, Conquest, Earth, Noses, Pretty

"The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past."

Barack Obama, American President

History, Colonialism, Past, Identity

"The good old days, when each idea had an owner, are gone forever."

Paulo Coelho, Brazilian Novelist

History, Change, Idea, Ownership, Past

"I was a pretty angry kid, and I got into military history largely as a way to vent my own anger. As I got older it narrowed down to a more specific focus on individual violence. I'm just trying to understand where it came from."

Caleb Carr, American Novelist

History, Anger, Focus, Military

Explore more quotes by John Boyd Orr

"The real evil of the Russian communist state is not communism. It is the secret police and the concentration camp."

Dictatorship, Communism, Evil, Police, State

"In the last five or six thousand years, empires one after another have arisen, waxed powerful by wars of conquest, and fallen by internal revolution or attack from without."

History, Conquest, Revolution, Years

"The increase of territory and power of empires by force of arms has been the policy of all great powers, and it has always been possible to get the approval of their state religion."

Power, Religion, Policy, Approval

"In the last fifty years science has advanced more than in the 2,000 previous years and given mankind greater powers over the forces of nature than the ancients ascribed to their gods."

Nature, Science, Gods, Mankind

"Our civilization has evolved through the continuous adjustment of society to the stimulus of new knowledge."

Society, Civilization, Knowledge

"Our civilization is now in the transition stage between the age of warring empires and a new age of world unity and peace."

Age, Peace, Civilization, Now

"After the First World War the economic problem was no longer one of production. It was the problem of finding markets to get the output of industry and agriculture dispersed and consumed."

War, Agriculture, First, Production

"Measured in time of transport and communication, the whole round globe is now smaller than a small European country was a hundred years ago."

Time, Communication, Country, Now

"During the last war when there was a market for everything that could be produced, the production capacity of Canada and the United States, which were outside the battle area, increased one hundred percent."

War, Battle, Canada, Production

"It is said that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. It may well be that a war neurosis stirred up by propaganda of fear and hatred is the prelude to destruction."

War, Fear, Gods, Destruction