Quotes about history

My point is, there’s always something. I think, as a species, we have a desire to believe that we’re living at the climax of the story. It’s a kind of narcissism. We want to believe that we’re uniquely important, that we’re living at the end of history, that now, after all these millennia of false alarms, now is finally the worst that it’s ever been, that finally we have reached the end of the world.

In history obedience rarely pays; what pays is defiance.

“History’s a stopped clock,” Eunice said. “It’s nice to look at, but there’s only so much you can tell you.”

“Could be worse, as they say.”

“That’s the sum story of human history, isn’t it? Could be worse. As if that’s the very best that we can manage.”

Civilisations beyond number had risen from obscurity, considering themselves masters of all creation, before fading back into the footnotes of history.

By and large these attempts to rewrite history were not taken seriously, but it was disconcerting to hear that they had gained even a toehold.

It was the wrong approach. But it was the only way we—they—could see at the time. So we mustn’t mock them for their mistakes. In two hundred years, someone will be just as quick to mock us for ours, if we’re not careful.

Moments of great cultural significance are often appreciated only in retrospect. The Sixties were different: the transcendent importance contemporaries attached to their own times—and their own selves—was one of the special features of the age.

Europe is not re-entering its troubled wartime past—on the contrary, it is leaving it. Germany today, like the rest of Europe, is more conscious of its twentieth-century history than at any time in the past fifty years. But this does not mean that it is being drawn back into it. For that history never went away.

Actually, each generation likes to think of itself as at the pivot point in history, that in its time the great decision is made which puts man either on the true road or the false. But things aren’t really that serious. Truthfully, the way of mankind is too massive to be kinked, suddenly; it only changes direction in a long and gradual bend over many generations.

A mistake constantly made by those who should know better is to judge people of the past by our standards rather than their own. The only way men or women can be judged is against the canvas of their own time.

Musical instruments are among the oldest human-made artifacts we have found. ...Music predates agriculture in the history of our species.