Past ages come to us in new ways. For instance, they bore or disturb us. The dead say things we would or could not say in ways that appall , bless, and startle us. Reading...

It is surprising how many great men started out as horse thieves.

Oral tradition is practised in most African cultures: ideals, family histories and legacies are handed down from one generation to the other physically or verbally. However, this system is flawed in the sense that a...

In a period of less than 150 years, to progress from slavery to Pennsylvania Avenue speaks volumes about this family and our nation. Distracted by the rush of our everyday life, we might shrug it...

The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately as a classic paranoid delusion. But in 1797 it was something that had never been encountered before, and would emerge...

Emancipation was a proclamation, but not a fact.

The rifts in this ancient wall continue to be patched with exhortations to women to avoid challenging the norm even if it means faking orgasm and sacrificing honesty in their intimate relationships with men. In...

Brant had said my embellishing constituted a disservice to history and its players. But I believed the opposite. Marooning them on the forlorn island of Only What We Know, a place whose boundaries were determined...

Some entertainers simply don’t know much about history. The fact is that there were no Jews in Hitler’s hierarchy, the policies of America and Israel are not similar to those of Hitler, and African-American conservatives...

One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best, not...

But I can no longer ready any faith’s Napoleonic saber rattling without picturing smoking rubble on cable news. I guess if I had to pick a spiritual figurehead to possess the deed to the entirety...

It’s an important part of history and everyone should be able to see it that way.

when history looks upon us to see where we are.

You deserved it.

The history written, taught, and sworn to as ‘the unvarnished truth’ by the establishment—any establishment, left or right, conservative or liberal, capitalist or socialist or fascist—is generally revisionist, narrow in perspective, monolithic, and agenda-driven. In...

History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.

…Raleigh was later to write, after a duel the hangman was the one who bestowed the garland on the victor.

As much as I want to be a part of the history of this tournament and a part of the history of the great game of golf, it’s not something I dwell on. I really...

Call no man happy until he is dead.

He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if...

In the long course of history, having people who understand your thought is much greater security than another submarine.

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to...

[In geology,] As in history, the material in hand remains silent if no questions are asked. The nature of these questions depends on the ‘school’ to which the geologist belongs and on the objectivity of...

Overriding all of them, however, was the memory of 1918, the belief that the Jews, wherever and whoever they might be, threatened to undermine the German war effort, by engaging in subversion, partisan activities, Communist...

Happy the people whose annals are blank in history books.

Not everyone is capable of sacrificing his own life. So it is, always has been and always will be.

For me, a journey to Damascus is an amazing hunt from beginning to end, a slice through layers of history in search of treasure.

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years’ War and the Opium Wars...

The king is a saint and cannot rule, and his son is a devil and should not.

I am convinced that human history has not yet begun, that we find ourselves in the last period of the prehistoric.

In 1546 a band of weevils were tried for damaging church vineyards in St Julien. Such trials were rife in the sixteenth century, and the distinguished French lawyer Bartholomew Chassenée rose to fame as an...

Love is the reflection of a broken heart in a shattered mirror…

If the Pentateuch is not inspired in its astronomy, geology, geography, history or philosophy, if it is not inspired concerning slavery, polygamy, war, law, religious or political liberty, or the rights of men, women and...

The future is the past returning through another gate.

Anything the Austrians could do, the Prussians could do better.

There is a strange idea abroad that in every subject the ancient book should be read only by the professionals, and the amateur should content himself with modern books.

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to...

I mean, I don’t know much about the Civil War, but whenever I think of that time—I mean, ever since Gone With the Wind I’ve had these fantasies about those generals, those gorgeous young Southern...

Mark Twain once said that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

History isn’t like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be...

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.

At last he was to feel that he had the town, as it were, in his pocket, and was ready for anything. Accordingly he sent a confidential messenger to Rome, to ask his father what...

Oh, don’t worry, I am perfectly aware of the fantasy involved here, but what we want is almost never exempt from the impossible. That barrier has very little meaning for me these days. Given what’s...

People kill very important people to change the season in their life.

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

Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear...

Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.

The tide of history only advances when people make themselves fully visible.

Don’t judge me by my past. I don’t live there anymore.

Serious affairs and history are carefully laid snares for the uninformed.