The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence and back into bondage. —Fraser Tyler More about this quote Tags: history apathy progress nations world faith liberty courage wealth slavery abundance Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
I think we are constantly faced with the same decision. The decision to be blindly obedient to authority versus the decision to try and change things by fighting the powers that be is always, throughout history, the only decision. —Abbie Hoffman More about this quote Tags: history power change authority fighting obedience Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The darkest hour in the history of any young man is when he sits down to study how to get money without honestly earning it. —Horace Greeley More about this quote Tags: history learning money earning studying Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Frederick William was deeply disappointed by his son, the future Frederick the Great, who in his youth seemed more interested in French culture, music, and literature than in the military virtues. The father's disaffection turned to actual hatred, and his treatment became so harsh that the young prince decided to run away, with the aid of two accomplices, Lieutenants Katte and Keith. The plan was discovered; Keith escaped, but the prince and Katte were captured and court-martialed. Katte was sentenced to life imprisonment, Frederick to solitary confinement. Frederick William, deciding that Katte's sentence was too lenient, had him beheaded in the presence of Prince Frederick. This drastic measure had the desired effect; Frederick asked the king's pardon and began to apply himself to acquiring the Prussian military philosophy. —The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes More about this quote Tags: history music escape art youth culture literature Prussia Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage — almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description. But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance. —Thomas Cahill More about this quote Tags: war history pain grace catastrophe outrage Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Slaves sing most when they are most unhappy. The songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart, and he is relieved by them, only as an aching heart is relieved by its tears. —Frederick Douglass More about this quote Tags: history heart sorrow tears unhappiness slavery songs relief Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Jews and blacks come from the same history. . . . We've just expressed our suffering differently as people. Blacks developed the blues. Jews complain; we just never thought of putting it to music. —Jon Stewart More about this quote Tags: history suffering complaining jewishness blackness Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics. —Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. More about this quote Tags: history development law mathematics Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
When Charles II had a fit while shaving in 1685, he was lucky to be treated with the finest medical advice of the day. He was attended by fourteen physicians who . . . shaved his head, applied blistering agents to his scalp, put special plasters made from pigeon droppings onto the soles of his feet, fed him bezoar stones (much-prized gallstones from the bladder of a goat), and made him drink forty drops of extract from a dead man's skull. He died two days later. —Karl Shaw More about this quote Tags: history medicine doctors Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
By today's standards, Hippocrates was a profoundly abnormal physician. Medicine's founding father routinely tasted his patients' urine, sampled their pus and earwax, and smelled and scrutinized their stool. He assessed the stickiness of their sweat and examined their blood, their phlegm, their tears, and their vomit. He became closely acquainted with their general disposition, family, and home, and he studied their facial expressions. In deciding upon a final diagnosis and treatment, Hippocrates . . . considered dietary habits, the season, the local prevailing winds, the water supply at the patient's residence, and the direction the home faced. . . . Modern-day physicians often cringe or shake their heads when they hear descriptions of Hippocrates' diagnostic methods; laypeople, however, . . . wonder aloud at how nice it might be to have Hippocrates as their doctor. —David H. Newman More about this quote Tags: history doctors. medicine Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history. —Plato More about this quote Tags: truth history poetry Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
A country can be judged by the quality of its proverbs. —German Proverb More about this quote Tags: politics history wisdom countries proverbs Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
You find lots of little things going on in every community in the country. If there is a world here in a hundred years, it will not be due to any big organization of any sort, no big political group, no big church, no big government. It is going to be saved by millions upon millions of little organizations. It might just be that what Jesus and Jeremiah and Mohammed and Buddha talked about will come true. —Pete Seeger More about this quote Tags: politics history government Jesus community organizations churches Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
History is a vast early warning system. —Norman Cousins More about this quote Tags: history Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email
After the Easter Rebellion of 1916 in Ireland, Eamon De Valera was sentenced to penal servitude. En route to his prison, he took out his pipe and was about to light it when he stopped suddenly and said, "I will not let them deprive me of this pleasure in jail!" He immediately threw away the pipe and from that day never smoked again. —Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes More about this quote Tags: history rebellion prison jail Permalink for this quote facebook twitter tumblr email