A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

I dont believe knowing can save us. What isconstant in history is greed and foolishness and a love of blood and this is a thing that even God-who knows all that can be known-seems powerless to change.

If you help load a cart you get a ride in it, as often as not. It gives him to think, how bad people are at loading carts. Men trying to walk straight ahead through a narrow gateway with a wide wooden...

The truly apocalyptic view of the world is that things do not repeat themselves. It isn't absurd, e.g., to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that...

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

Rome tolerated every abominable practice, embraced every foul idea in the name of freedom and the rights of the common man. Citizens no longer carried on deviant behavior in private, but pridefully...

He sat there all through a history lesson about the Roman Empire, which--having lived in the Roman Empire, for the four hundred years during which it had included the British Isles--he found...

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our...

My mother, who would always buy her books new, hated it the vintage hardcovers with their cracked spines and threadbare cloth covers. True you couldn't go in there and buy the latest best seller, but...

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

Historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation. We are doomed to...

This may be the most important proposition revealed by history: 'At the time, no one knew what was coming.

Arthur managed to speak to his grandmother {Queen Eleanor of England}, demanding that she evacuate the castle with all her possessions and then go peaceably wherever she wished, for he wanted to show...

They inhabited a lost world of splendour and brutality, a world dominated by religious change, in which there were few saints.

At a time when history made its way slowly, the few events were easily remembered and woven into a backdrop, known to everyone, before which private life unfolded the gripping show of its adventures....

The first step in liquidating a people,' said Hubl, 'is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new...

Perhaps this is how it is--life flowing smoothly over memory and history, the past returning or not, depending on the tide. History is a collection of found objects washed up through time. Goods,...

I went to my grandmother, your great-great-grandmother, and asked her to write a letter. She was my mother's mother. Your father's mother's mother's mother. I hardly knew her. I didn't have any...

The Northern powers are more like administrators, who manipulate other people's history but produce none of their own. They are the stock-jobbers of history, lives are their units of exchange. Lives...

It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

History is a construct...Any point of entry is possible and all choices are arbitrary. Still there are definitive moments...We can look at these events and say that after them things were never the...

As we know from the study of history, no new system can impose itself upon a previous one without incorporating many of the elements to be found in the latter...

It's the reward of the business {historian}, to look history in the eye & say, 'I know who you are. You can't fool me.

As a historian, I have learned that, in fact, not everyone who reaches back into history can survive it. And it is not only reaching back that endangers us; sometimes history itself reaches inexorably...

American political discourse had framed the Jewish problem as an immigration problem. Germany's persecution of Jews raised the specter of a vast influx of Jewish refugees at a time when America was...

A library is not information; it is a means of preserving information. In every case, before memory or information can be stored, someone must decide what must be stored. Someone must choose. Someone...

It doesn't follow that a nasty habit of mind is any less nasty because it's ancestral. It doesn't follow you can't cure it. Why scratch fleas for ever? Gambling, speculation, is a social disease. It's...

The biggest threat to Western civilization is posed not by other civilizations, but by our own pusillanimity - and by the historical ignorance that feeds it.

History, in general, only informs us what bad government is.