“I love Dickens. I love the way he sets a scene. He said, in his great admonition to writers, ‘Make me see.’ I try to make you see what’s happening and smell it and hear it. I want to know what they had for dinner. I want to know how long it took to walk from where to where.”

David McCullough

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“One thing we do know, that we dare not forget, is that better solutions than ours have at times been made by people with much less information than we have. We know too, from the study of agriculture, that the same information, tools, and techniques that in one farmer’s hands will ruin land, in another’s will save and improve it.”

Wendell Berry

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“There are very few moments in our lives where we have the privilege to witness history taking place. This is one of those moments. This is one of those times. The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same.”

President Barack Obama

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“Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing the things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues. The story of civili-zation is the story of what happened on the banks.”

Will Durant

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“Part of the interest of any old book is its individual history, which can be gathered from the binding, book-plates, marginal notes, names of former owners, &c., and anything that tends to obliterate these signs is to be deplored.”

Douglas Cockerell

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“History is open to interpretation, but it isn’t a toy dog you can make leap however you like.”

Neil Steinberg

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“Geologic history shows us that life is only a short episode between two eternities of death, and that, even in this episode, conscious thought has lasted and will last only a moment. Thought is only a gleam in the midst of a long night.
        But it is this gleam which is everything.”

Henri Poincaré

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“The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.”

Umberto Eco

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“A traveler is to be reverenced as such. His profession is the best symbol of our life. Going from — toward — ; it is the history of every one of us.”

Henry David Thoreau

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“We always need to remember that behind almost every great moment in history, there are heroic people doing really boring and frustrating things for a prolonged period of time.”

Gail Collins

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“This was B.G. (Before Google.)”

Maureen Dowd

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“The young are born to the human condition more than to their time, and they face mainly the same trials and obligations as their elders have faced.”

Wendell Berry

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“The end of an Empire is messy at best
And this Empire is ending
Like all the rest”

Randy Newman

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“History requires a world of time and bitter hard work when your ‘education’ is no further advanced than the cat’s; when you are merely stuffing yourself with a mixed-up mess of empty names and random incidents and elusive dates, which no one teaches you how to interpret, and which, uninterpreted, pay you not a farthing’s value for your waste of time.”

Mark Twain

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“I’m sorry, I’ve never been a fan of books. I don’t trust them. They’re all fact, no heart. I mean, they’re elitist, telling us what is or isn’t true or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say it was built in 1941, that’s my right as an American! I’m with the President. Let history decide what did or did not happen.”

Stephen Colbert

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