Quotes about History

At the time of Christ the world population stood at about 200 million. By AD 1200 the world population had doubled to about 400 million. By the time of the American Revolution, in 1776, the world population had doubled again, to about 800 million. The population doubled again by 1900, to about 1.6 billion. The population doubled again by 1960, to more than 3 billion.1 From the time of Christ the population doubles in

increasingly short periods of time—first 1,200 years, then less than 600 years, then less than 125 years, then 50 years.

One of the embarrassing problems for the early nineteenth-century champions of the Christian faith was that not one of the first six Presidents of the United States was an orthodox Christian.

For every struggle that Joe survived, For every dispute he endured, to rise, Joe will go down in history as a model for champions to come. While Frazier was a man of few words, Ali was a world of mouth, but he found his place in history. Now his heart can express him well. Joe Frazier was a silent warrior, whom Ali silently admired. One could not rise without the other.

The time when Christ was 33, so I could see if he really got up from the grave. Or maybe I'd go back to the time of Cleopatra, before Marc Antony got tight with her. I'd try to hit on her first.

All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

Stripped of its arrogance, its desire to make off with half of the patrimony and never be seen again, history belongs at the family table. If theology, the older brother, pretends not to need or notice him it will be a sign that he has forgotten, after all, who his father is.

Traditions tell us where we have come from. Scripture itself is a better guide as to where we should now be going.

Financial crashes happen precisely because the people who remember the last one have either died or retired and thus are no longer around, with memories and character formed by that previous experience, to warn people not to be irresponsible.

if it is true that Jesus ultimately fits no known pattern within the first century,51 it is more or less bound to be true that he fits none within the twentieth.

But the failure of Christianity is a modern myth, and we shouldn't be ashamed of telling the proper story of church history, which of course has plenty of muddle and wickedness, but also far more than we normally imagine of love and creativity and beauty and justice and healing and education and hope. To

Whether we believe in Jesus, whether we approve of his teaching, let alone whether we like the look of the movement that still claims to follow him, we are bound to see his crucifixion as one of the pivotal moments in human history.