22 Quotes Tagged: History

It is the glory of London that it is always ending and beginning anew, and that a visitor, with a good eye and indefatigable feet, will find in her travels all the Londons she has ever met in the pages of books, one atop the other, like the strata of the Earth.

The careful study of history is of hight value - among other reasons because it may instruct us, sometimes, concerning ways to deal with our present cisontentk. I do not mean simply that history repeats itself, or repeats itself with variation - although there is something in that, and particularly in the history of revolutions on the French model, which devour their own children. I am suggesting, rather, that deficiency in historical perspective leads to the ruinous blunders of ideologues, whom Burckhardt calls "the terrible simplifiers," while sound historical knowledge may diminish the force of Hegel's aphorism that "we learn from history that we learn nothing from history."

Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.

Patricia embraces me on the station platform. 'The past is what you leave behind in life, Ruby,' she says with the smile of a reincarnated lama. 'Nonsense, Patricia,' I tell her as I climb on board my train. 'The past's what you take with you.

The action of social revolution and the reaction of guarding against such revolution or combating it once it has begun are the causes of a great deal of the human misery with which history is permeated.

A historian who would convey the truth has got to lie.

The careful study of history is of high value - among other reasons because it may instruct us, sometimes, concerning ways to deal our present discontents. I do not mean simply hat history repeats itself, or repeats itself with variations - although there is something in that, and particularly in the history of revolutions on the French model, which devour their own children. I am suggesting, rather, that deficiency in historical perspective leads to the ruinous blunders of of ideologues, whom Burckhardt call "the terrible simplifiers," while sound historical may diminish the force of Hegel's aphorism that "we Learn from history that we learn nothing from history."

I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations.

Indian thought has traditionally regarded history and prehistory in cyclical rather than linear terms. In the West time is an arrow — we are born, we live, we die. But in India we die only to be reborn. Indeed, it is a deeply rooted idea in Indian spiritual traditions that the earth itself and all living creatures upon it are locked into an immense cosmic cycle of birth, growth, fruition, death, rebirth and renewal. Even temples are reborn after they grow too old to be used safely — through the simple expedient of reconstruction on the same site.
Within this pattern of spiralling cycles, where everything that goes around comes around, India conceives of four great epochs of 'world ages' of varying but enormous lengths: the Krita Yuga, the Treta Yuga, the Davapara Yuga and the Kali Yuga. At the end of each yuga a cataclysm, known as pralaya, engulfs the globe in fire or flood. Then from the ruins of the former age, like the Phoenix emerging from the ashes, the new age begins.

We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties.

History is for human self-knowledge…the only clue to what man can do is what man has done. The value of history, then, is that it teaches us what man has done and thus what man is.

Reading history is like binge-watching the highlight reels from past seasons of current affairs.

Even the sternest oppression, however, cannot stop human thought forever.

Протягом усієї історії деспотичні правителі міняли добробут своїх підданих на те, що вони вважають честю, славою та завоюваннями.

One reason we think the past was more violent than reality is because historians like to discuss wars, not peace.