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History Quotes
"After more than a thousand years,' he continued, 'an enemy finally broke through. Not because of superior firepower. Not because the Manchus were better fighters or strategists. They weren't. The Manchus breached the Great Wall and took Beijing because someone opened a gate. From the inside. As simple as that. A general, a traitor, let them in and an empire fell."
14
"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."
14
"Every library should try to be complete on something, if it were only the history of pinheads."
14
"The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past."
14
"You see, Mersualt, all the misery and cruelty of our civilisation can be measured by this one stupid axiom: happy nations have no history."
14
"Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong."
14
"And always we had wars, and more wars, and still other wars--all over Europe, all over the world. "Sometimes in the private interest of royal families," Satan said, "sometimes to crush a weak nation; but never a war started by the aggressor for any clean purpose--there is no such war in the history of the race."
14
"Every one knew he could foretell wars and famines, though that was not so hard, for there was always a war, and generally a famine somewhere."
14
"Men do not learn much from the lessons of history and that is the most important of all the lessons of history."
14
"History is the record of an encounter between character and circumstances."
14
"The historic glory of America lies in the fact that it is the one nation that was founded like a church. That is it was founded on a faith that was not merely summed up after it had exited but was defined before it existed."
14
"No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops."
14
"There was a time when people accepted magical experiences as natural. There were no priests then, and no one went chasing after the secrets of the occult."
14
"Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them."
14
"Some points in time cannot flow. Think of those big-ticket moments, the ones you could still recite from fifth grade: your 1492 and Civil Wars, the Titanic and presidential assassinations. These are icebergs, solid and immense, forcing incalculable eddies to swirl around them."
14
"The land has a memory. Every stream and river runs with a confession of sorts, history whispered over rocks, lifted in the beaks of birds at a stream, carried out to the sea. Buffalo thunder across plains whose soil was watered with the blood of battles long since relegated to musty books on forgotten shelves. Fields once strewn with blue and gray now flower with uneasy buds. The slave master snaps the lash, and generations later, the ancestral scars remain.Under it all, the dead lie, remembering."
14
"Now at this very moment I knew that the United States was in the war, up to the neck and in to the death. So we had won after all! ... How long the war would last or in what fashion it would end no man could tell, nor did I at this moment care ... We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end ... Hitler's fate was sealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they would be ground to a powder. All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force."
14
"Mankind have a little corrupted nature, for they were not born wolves, and they have become wolves; God has given them neither cannon of four-and-twenty pounders, nor bayonets; and yet they have made cannon and bayonets to destroy one another."
14
"History will be erased in the universal purgatory."
14
"The opportunity of studying history, is the opportunity to experience empathy."
14
"Creators of history always play with our impotence and our ignorance."
14
"It's about recognizing that the great movements and moments in history laid on the backs of ordinary people who simply chose to do extraordinary things."
14
"History reminds us that revolutions are not events, so much that they're processes " that for tens of thousands of years, people have been making decisions that irrevocably shaped the world that we live in today; just as today, we are making subtle, irrevocable decisions that people of the future will remember as revolutions."
14
"The evidence of history is against you. The contemporary historian never writes such a true history as the historian of a later generation. It is a question of getting the true perspective, of seeing things in proportion."
14
"... the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the newgovernment owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery, and, evenafter slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and theirdescendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines."
14
"A lot of what we know to be history isn't it serves a purpose. Events are exaggerated, heroes fabricated, goals are rewritten to appear more noble than they actually were. All to manipulate public opinion, to manufacture a common purpose or enemy. And the cornerstone of a really great movement? A powerful symbol. Take away or tarnish that and everything starts to crumble, everything's questioned."
14
"For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other-Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time."
14
"The nature of journalism has been the enemy of idealism and the source of cynicism among American reporters and editors throughout our history."
14
"When the venture has been made of dealing with historical events and characters, it always seems fair towards the reader to avow what liberties have been taken, and how much of the sketch is founded on history."
14
"Those who stand for different causes during different generations often experience the same oppositions and the same difficulties as those of the previous and the next generations. That is the basis of history repeating itself."
13
"The vintage of history is forever repeating ~ same old vines, same old wines!"
13
"Significant anniversaries are solemnly commemorated - Japan's attack on the U.S. naval base at Pearl Harbor, for example."
13
"Yes, I know, it's not the truth, but in a great history little truths can be altered so that the greater truth emerges."
13
"It is supposed to be true that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it. I dont believe knowing can save us. What is constant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God - who knows all that can be known - seems powerless to change."
13
"The ones who did it can always rationalize their actions and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don't want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can't turn away. Their memories are passed on from parent to child. That's what the world is, after all: an endless battle of contrasting memories."
13
"Any person who considers himself, and intends to remain, a member of Western society inherits the Western past from Athens and Jerusalem to Runnymede and Valley Forge, as well as to Watts and Chicago of August 1968. He may ignore it or deny it, but that does not alter the fact. The past sits back and smiles and knows it owns him anyway."
13
"If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing."
13
"Our aadivasi sisters and brothers have played a paramount role in the freedom struggle. For hundreds of years, people across villages of the country kept alive the flame of sacrifices for attaining independence. They left no stone unturned in helping India attain freedom."
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