If it happens that the human race doesn’t make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered...

History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.

We don’t always connect ourselves with our history.

A day came when I should have died,and after than nothing seemed very important, so I stayed as I am, without regret separated from the normal human condition.

The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries.[Letter objecting to the use of government...

That’s how it is for us servants. No one pays you much heed; mostly you’re invisible as furniture. Yet you overhear a conversation here, and add a little gossip there. A writing desk lies open...

Hurricanes are part of southern history, remembered for the damage they caused.

In any case, Cide Hamete Benengeli was a very careful historian, and very accurate in all things, as can be clearly seen in the details he relates to us, for although they are trivial and...

…in my wildest, most indulgent dreams, we only hear about sexual assault & abuse in history books.

…you don’t fully appreciate what you’ve got until something threatens to take it away.

When William Johnson and slave walked down that long, winding American road toward freedom and justice, they didn’t realize they would be speaking out for all those left behind. They learned that it would take...

There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the...

I remembered the dim winter light, the smell of damp earth and leaves, the eeriness that always attaches to a place once settled and civilized, but now reclaimed by the wilderness.

Our past shapes our future whether we realize it or not. Remembering well is as important as doing well.” — Jonita Mullins

Integrating the beauty of seasonal change into the residence was a concept that remains true even today even in the more cramped, inner city machiya.

There had been a wonderful atmosphere of liberation and camaraderie. The Russians hated it.

History is a Rorschach test, people. What you see when you look at it tells you as much about yourself as it does about the past.

He who has never left his hearth and has confined his researches to the narrow field of the history of his own country cannot be compared to the courageous traveller who has worn out his...

Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.)

Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it...

I think I have done well, though I am abandoned, with the curse of Cain upon me.

I have taken a different approach. One that I hope is more easily accessible to the reader’s emotional imagination, though less analytically systematic. I have summoned back into life again—through my own translations from a...

His acceleration is unmatched in the NFL, in history. You look at every defensive back in the NFL and compare their acceleration, their closing speed with Troy. There is none.

The historian, predisposed to verbal evidence, who reads about rather than looks at objects, becomes dependent upon secondhand impressions and is helpless when critics disagree or interpose their own extraneous judgments between the work and...

My choice of Muhammad to lead the list of the world’s most influential persons may surprise some readers and may be questioned by others, but he was the only man in history who was supremely...

We need the courage to learn from our past and not live in it.

No word matters. But man forgets reality and remembers words.

For some, excavating the past isn’t an adventure, it’s more akin to tearing a Band-Aid off an open wound.

Hence a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilization. Religion begins by offering magical aid to harassed and bewildered men; it culminates by giving to a people that unity...

The first qualification for a historian is to have no ability to invent.

This light of history is pitiless; it has a strange and divine quality that, luminous as it is, and precisely because it is luminous, often casts a shadow just where we saw a radiance; out...

I may not sound wrong when I say that by revealing history, you end up making it.

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history – which one both participates in and is a witness to,...

Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the...

how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

The death-knell of the republic had rung as soon as the active power became lodged in the hands of those who sought, not to do justice to all citizens, rich and poor alike, but to...

Sungguh-sungguh, sifat gadis tua, menyanjung-nyanjung kenangan lama.

One enjoys the good things more to the extent that one goes to them after having labored in advance, for labors are a sauce for good things

As far as Popescu was concerned, meanwhile, Dracula was simply a Romanian patriot who had resisted the Turks, a deed for which every European nation should to some degree be grateful. History is cruel, said...

It is surprising to me that one of the great crimes of history has gone unnoticed; the abduction of god by religions. This slight-of-hand has been the cause of countless blood-shed and has been found...

History is story, too. You don’t encounter her directly; you’ve only heard of her through narrative of one sort or another.

He will be remembered not only as a pioneer in his time, but as a dominant figure in world history,

For when I trace back the years I have liv’d, gathering them up in my Memory, I see what a chequer’d Work Of Nature my life has been. If I were now to inscribe my...

No wonder you were abducted so easily.

It is my conviction that, with the spread of true scientific culture, whatever may be the medium, historical, philological, philosophical, or physical, through which that culture is conveyed, and with its necessary concomitant, a constant...

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that...

The past is dangerous, not least because it cannot go away. It is simply there, never to change, and in its constancy it reflects the eternity of God. It presents to the young mind a...

Social and cultural history is often comprised of whatever diaries and letters remain and that is down to chance and wide open to interpretation.

Find answers in your weakness and surprise in your strength and always remember the golden rule every failure has HOPES

John had been a footman nearly all of his adult life. He knew decorum and appropriate behavior for his situation. But when he glanced from one twin to another, he nearly ruined his reputation and...