History Quotes
Find one of the best and famous quote catagorized into topics like inspirational, motivations, deep, thoughtful, art, success, passion, frindship, life, love and many more.
At its height, Rome's empire stretched right along the coast of north Africa and sub-Saharan Africans passed to and fro across its porous southern border.
Quote by -David Olusoga
After 150 years, Bristol's prime music venue is to finally change its name and thereby cut its link to the infamous slave trader Edward Colston.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Ultimately, the naming of buildings is not a mechanism by which history is kept alive. It is a mechanism by which the rich and the powerful are honoured.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The loss of the American colonies was the first time the process of British empire building had been put significantly into reverse, and became the starting point for a nostalgic yearning for lost colonies - and the wealth and global influence that came with them - that has become part of our national psyche.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Many anglophone Africans still have deep emotional, economic and often familial links to Britain, but those with money are now as keen to holiday in Dubai as London.
Quote by -David Olusoga
I finally got to watch 'Roots' in my mid-teens, on a video rental. Slowly and meticulously Roots fed its black characters through the mincing machine of American slavery. People with names, hopes and family connections were destroyed and dehumanised before my eyes.
Quote by -David Olusoga
People are interested in people. They buy biographies; they don't buy studies of presidencies.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When you look at the development of the American presidency, you see that the presidents who have had the greatest impact are the ones who fit their times most successfully.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Politics is not something most people have to do every day. Their daily lives are much more influenced by job opportunities, whether the country is in a recession or a boom period. If you really want to understand what drives American history, look at the economic... side.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Harry Truman's decision to fire Douglas MacArthur at the height of the Korean War in April 1951 shocked the American political system and astonished the world. Much of the world didn't realize the president had the power to fire a five-star general; much of America didn't realize Truman had the nerve.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Every year, I have my graduate students read the great works of history, from classical times to the present. They gamely tackle Tacitus, ponder Plutarch, plow through Gibbon. Then they get to Thomas Carlyle and feel like Dorothy when she touched down in Technicolor Oz.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I was raised in, and presumably to, the cutlery business. I really didn't think that that's what I wanted to do for a career. But I felt a certain obligation to give it a try.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
It's hard to get in the head of somebody. The closest we can get is through the words they've left behind, either their contemporary correspondence or after-the-fact memoirs.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
With my first few books, I was aiming at an academic audience, basically, to get tenure. You can presuppose a certain amount of knowledge; you can expect that there is this common background.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When you tell a story, there are imperatives of structure, of style, of pacing and all of this, that are there simply because you want to make it a good story. When do you introduce your characters? When do you put them onstage, when do you take them off the stage? How do you weave the different threads of the narrative together?
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I'm trying to tell the story of the evolution of America. Each biography is a life in time, and I can see there's a particular task for each generation that I write about.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I had long known the story of Aaron Burr, but when I heard about his remarkable daughter, Theodosia, about the relationship between the two and about her tragic disappearance, I knew I wanted to tell their story.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan has been deified by the Republican Party, which is odd. The Reagan that modern Republicans revere is not the real Reagan.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The Republican Party has moved substantially to the right of where Reagan was.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Reagan gave essentially the same speech from the beginning to the end of his political career, which was always, 'The American people are great, the government always screws things up, let's get the government out of the way.' On the foreign policy side it was, 'Communism is bad, and we're going to defeat it.'
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I've been writing American history for a long time, and I've had a hard time finding strong, interesting female characters. There are women, of course, in American history, but they're hard to write about because they don't leave much of a historical trace, and they're not usually involved in high-profile public events.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
I've been writing big stories of history, but there are a lot of fascinating little stories.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When a president was elected with foreign policy experience, it was usually less about his foreign policy experience than other things.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Interest in the Founders has risen and fallen over time, as has admiration for them and their accomplishments.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In revering the Founders, we undervalue ourselves and sabotage our own efforts to make improvements - necessary improvements - in the republican experiment they began.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Our love for the Founders leads us to abandon, and even to betray, the very principles they fought for.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The Founders were anything but demigods to themselves and their contemporaries, who recognized full well that the experiment in self-government had only begun.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
People who teach American history survey classes have a lot of ground to cover and tend to focus on landmarks. You get through the Civil War and Reconstruction, and you have to get to the beginning of the 20th century fast. It's pretty easy to go lightly on the Gilded Age.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The president was not the most important political player in the 19th century. Besides Jefferson at the beginning, Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln, the center of politics was Congress.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The historic dearth of labor was perhaps the central feature of the American economy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
The Catalonian movement is quite serious; I don't think it's simply symbolic. I think that they believe that Catalonia can be more successful on its own than as part of Spain.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
It's not an exaggeration to say that Texas gets a lot more out of being part of the United States than the United States gets out of having Texas as one of the states.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
A president can start a war under relatively specious circumstances, and once American soldiers are under fire, Americans will support the soldiers and support the president.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Abraham Lincoln spoke out against the Mexican War. But once Americans were under fire, people who were on the fence felt obliged to support it.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
A lot of people were ambivalent about Vietnam. Lyndon Johnson in 1964 positioned himself as the peace candidate. Once Johnson sent large amounts of troops into battle in 1965, most Americans were behind the war.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
In the early 19th to the early 20th century, people had a lot of things wrong with them. Doctors didn't know how to fix them, and so they lived with them.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When a president doesn't know the policy, it doesn't make for a very effective leader.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
Theodore Roosevelt, when he was out of office, he would do things to draw attention. But when you are president, you don't need to shout. When you are in office, you are the story.
Quote by -H. W. Brands
When people think of the oil industry, they think of Rockefeller, much like when people think of the software industry, they think of Bill Gates.
Quote by -H. W. Brands