Quotes about history

Most people go through life never knowing the truth about the major events of their time. They're watching a farce performed at the edge of the stage while the real drama is going on behind the curtain.

Half the things you've been taught in school are just convenient fictions. History is a puppet show for childish minds.

Like fish who do not know they swim in water, we are seldom aware of the atmosphere of the times through which we move, how strange and singular they are. But when we approach another age, its alienness stands out before us, almost as if that were its most obvious quality...

Whatever we experience in our day, whatever we hope to learn, whatever we most desire, whatever we set out to find, we see that the Greeks have been there before us, and we meet them on their way back.

For me, the historian's principal task should be to raise the dead to life.

Ireland is unique in religious history for being the only land into which Christianity was introduced without bloodshed.

Science and technology derive from the effort to understand and control the natural environment. Familiarity with the history of science is essential to an awareness of the development of society.

Ingenuity, knowledge, and organization alter but cannot cancel humanity's vulnerability to invasion by parasitic forms of life. Infectious disease which antedated the emergence of humankind will last as long as humanity itself, and will surely remain, as it has been hitherto, one of the fundamental parameters and determinants of human history.

All this long human story, most passionate and tragic in the living, was but an unimportant, a seemingly barren and negligible effort, lasting only for a few moments in the life of the galaxy.

I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars.

For better, for worse – fair and foul – the world we know today is in large measure the product of Britain’s age of Empire. The question is not whether British imperialism was without a blemish. It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity. Perhaps in theory there could have been. But in practice?

The powers who controlled the United States didn't want the people to know their history. If the people knew their history, they would realize they must rise up. (Part Three, Book Two: Arizona)