Quotes about History

Christendom has often achieved apparent success by ignoring the precepts of its founder.

The past sharpens perspective, warns against pitfalls, and helps to point the way.

The history of missions is a history of prayer. Everything vital to the success of the world's evangelization hinges on prayer.

So this was all which these Pharisees and Scribes could see in the miracle of Christ's feeding the Multitude--that it had not been done according to Law! Most strange as it may seem, yet in the past history of the Church, and, perhaps, sometimes also in the present, this has been the only thing which some men have seen in the miraculous working of the Christ!

In Berlin evil came to them slowly and then all at once.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them.

I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.

That was history, in his opinion: that sorrow was unalterable and ever present. That tears could be preserved in the hardest granite.

If a woman doesn't write her own history, there are very few who will.

I know we lived among extraordinary things but, perhaps more importantly, in extraordinary times. People may or may not remember the heroes and the villains of our day, but all that the brave among us did, and all that they were, remains with us still.

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.

Our mothers taught us that in the old, old days, when they were their grandmothers and their grandmothers were old—for we are our grandmothers, you understand, only with lots of new and different things added