#history

The ascent of money has been essential to the ascent of man. ↗

— Niall Ferguson

#financial-history #history #money #money

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#violence #war #violence

All over the world major museums have bowed to the influence of Disney and become theme parks in their own right. The past, whether Renaissance Italy or Ancient Egypt, is re-assimilated and homogenized into its most digestible form. Desperate for the new, but disappointed with anything but the familiar, we recolonize past and future. The same trend can be seen in personal relationships, in the way people are expected to package themselves, their emotions and sexuality, in attractive and instantly appealing forms. ↗

— J.G. Ballard

#disney #future #history #past #relationships

Nescire autem quid antequam natus sis acciderit, id est semper esse puerum. (To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain always a child.) ↗

— Marcus Tullius Cicero

#latin #ignorance

Some people like the Jews, and some do not. But no thoughtful man can deny the fact that they are, beyond any question, the most formidable and most remarkable race which has appeared in the world. — Winston S. Churchill ↗

— Ellen Brazer

#espionage #historical-novel #history #holocaust #intrigue

Historical determinism is a recipe for political quietism. ↗

— Terry Eagleton

#apathy #apolitical #determinism #historical-determinism #history

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 be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot. ↗

— Simon Schama

#history #historical

If I had known they were going to do this, I would have become a shoemaker. ↗

— Albert Einstein

#guilt #history #war #destruction

The sea is nothing but a library of all the tears in history. ↗

— Lemony Snicket

#history #library #tears #tears

In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time. ↗

— Elisabeth Tova Bailey

#natural-history #non-fiction #life