Top 100 Quotes About Ancient History

#1. The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skilful people in history.

Yuval Noah Harari

#2. Oblige me by taking away that knife. I can't look at the point of it. It reminds me of Roman history.

James Joyce

#3. His constant references to the ancient world have the effect of giving ordinary soldiers a sense of their lives.

Andrew Roberts

#4. Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

Stacy Schiff

#5. History, when they do it, is ancient history, and they sensationalize even that. Contemporary history is virtually ignored on television.

Tariq Ali

#6. Sort of like what Joruus C'baoth did for Thrawn."
"I'm not talking about ancient history, I'm talking about now."
Luke & Jaina

Aaron Allston

#7. Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island.

Nicolas Cage

#8. Captive Greece took captive her savage conquerer and brought the arts to rustic Latium

Horace

#9. We know that golf is an ancient game with great history and tradition, but our golf is only 10 years old so don't judge us too harshly.

Nursultan Nazarbayev

#10. Hate often separates those who ought to aid one another, since they are tending toward the same goal, and sympathy binds men together who are forced to do battle with one another.

Guglielmo Ferrero

#11. I wanted to get the most broad foundation for a lifelong education that I could find, and that was studying Latin and the classics. Meaning Roman and Greek history and philosophy and ancient civilizations.

Tim Blake Nelson

#12. Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches and in punishment there is so much that is festive!

Friedrich Nietzsche

#13. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

#14. It's wrong to look at what we call 'Enlightenment values' as some fad of the 18th century. It's deeply rooted in ancient history.

Matthew Stewart

#15. All ancient history was written with a moral object; the ethical interest predominates almost to the exclusion of all others.

Tacitus

#16. The claim "oh, that's ancient history" is almost always a wish, am anxious attempt to put a boundary of time around some event that really is not over at all; it is a bid to silence the past.

Robert A. Orsi

#17. The golden section was discovered by the Egyptians, and has been used in art and architecture, most commonly, during the classical ages of Egypt and Greece.

Steven L. Griffing

#18. No one knows exactly when or where the redwood entered the history of life on earth, though it is an ancient kind of tree and has come down to our world as an inheritance out of deep time.

Richard Preston

#19. In order to witness clearly the march of humanity from its inception to the present moment, an understanding of how humankind has held encounter with the divine as central is crucial. Ancient humanity provides us with an excellent laboratory for gaining such an understanding.

Roger D. Woodard

#20. The new history is really ancient history newly discovered. Journalists are taking crash courses in the blood-drenched background of Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, North Ossetians, Armenians and Azerbaijanis.

Henry Grunwald

#21. Throughout its history, Islam has borrowed and adapted from other civilizations, both ancient and modern.

Shereen El Feki

#22. Ah, but is any history really all that ancient?' Second asked. 'Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present?'
This man was more annoying than any history teacher Jordan had ever had.

Margaret Peterson Haddix

#23. Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. The ode sings of eternity, the epic imparts solemnity tohistory, the drama depicts life. The characteristic of the first poetry is ingeniousness, of the second, simplicity, of the third, truth.

Victor Hugo

#24. The wisdom of our ancestors is immortal.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#25. Since ancient times, sacred texts from around the world foretold about a time period in human history when a mighty demi-god would appear on earth. Whether we call this figure Perseus, Krishna, or Messiah, he is epitomized in the figure of Jesus Christ - the modern equivalent of which is Superman!

Eli Of Kittim

#26. Every family has one living patriarch or matriarch, the final arbiter and repository of ancient family history, and Nicole's Aunt Patti was the last woman standing.

Liz Rosenberg

#27. No system in history capitalism has been more relentless in battering down ancient and fragile cultures, devouring the resources of whole regions, pulverizing centuries-old practices in a matter of years, and standardizing the varieties of human experience.

Michael Parenti

#28. The spirituality of the sun was, for thousands of years, the dominant religion of the ancient world. If you trace it far back enough, its origin stretches well beyond recorded history into the most ancient sacred texts, and from there, into the most ancient of myths and legends.

Belsebuub

#29. And someday when the descendants of humanity have spread from star to star they won't tell the children about the history of Ancient Earth until they're old enough to bear it and when they learn they'll weep to hear that such a thing as Death had ever once existed

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#30. So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past.

Zadie Smith

#31. Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.

Edward Gibbon

#32. The Bible is a book of Science. Secular Humanism is a religion of mythology.

Michael J. Findley

#33. Ancient history, besides the still unequalled excellence of the writers, is the best instrument for cultivating the historical sense.

Goldwin Smith

#34. Is your Christianity ancient history
or current events?

Sam Shoemaker

#35. Europe's history of trading relations with India is borne out in the writings of the ancient historians Herodotus, Pliny, Petronius and Ptolemy, and

Shashi Tharoor

#36. We are still living in a wonderful new world where man thinks himself astonishingly new and "modern." This is unmistakable proof of the youthfulness of human consciousness, which has not yet grown aware of its historical antecedents.

C. G. Jung

#37. In the more recently disclosed field of history in the ancient Near East, however, there has been no such sense of responsibility displayed by historians either in Europe or America.

James Henry Breasted

#38. Look how Bill Cohen and George Mitchell worked together. It's the stuff of legends. And now it's the stuff of almost ancient history, regrettably, but the way those two really worked together.

Barbara Mikulski

#39. Is any history really all that ancient? ... Doesn't every moment from the past affect the present?

Margaret Peterson Haddix

#40. No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.

Hannah Arendt

#41. Sir P. C. Roy's History of Hindu Chemistry, in B. N. Seal's Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus, in B. K. Sarkar's Hindu Achievements in Exact Science and his The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, and in U. C. Dutt's Materia Medica of the Hindus. 2

Paramahansa Yogananda

#42. What satellites help to show us is we've actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world ... It's the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.

Sarah Parcak

#43. This tale grew in the telling, until it became a history of the Great War of the Ring and included many glimpses of the yet more ancient history that preceded it.

J.R.R. Tolkien

#44. The Golden Ratio defines the squaring of a circle. Stated in mathematical terms, this says: Given a square of known perimeter, create a circle of equal circumference. According to some, in ancient Egypt, this mathematical mystery was encoded in the measurements of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

Marja De Vries

#45. Yet these ancient kingdoms of sand and snow are set apart from the rest of Westeros by history, culture, and tradition. Both are thinly peopled, compared to the lands betwixt.

Anonymous

#46. The basic operating premise for the ancient Mesopotamians throughout all periods of their history is that humans were created and placed on earth so the gods did not have to work.

Tammi J. Schneider

#47. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away. This is not ancient history. This is Germany 1933 ... Politics is the moat, the walls, beyond which lie the barbarians. Fail to keep them at bay, and everything burns.

Charles Krauthammer

#48. I couldn't miss Percy's fifteenth birthday," Poseidon said. "Why, if this were Sparta, Percy would be a man today!"
"That's true," Paul said. "I used to teach ancient history."
Poseidon's eyes twinkled. "That's me. Ancient history.

Rick Riordan

#49. The story in that particular spot was an ancient history story, and we wanted to give it a historical feeling, which was why we used a historical calligraphy scroll come to life.

Jennifer Yuh Nelson

#50. The resurrection is a fact better attested than any event recorded in any history, whether ancient or modern.

Charles Spurgeon

#51. Only with maturity did I come to appreciate my own Chinese roots: not just the food and the ancient history, but also the philosophy of child-rearing and the respect for education and knowledge.

Tess Gerritsen

#52. Shakespearean tragedy is neither ancient history nor fairy tale. Perhaps to express this is the most important thing. In which period does the action of the play take place? It is in that past which can become the future.

Grigori Kozintsev

#53. * Pindar, a Thebian Greek wrote (circa 350 B.C.E.) War is sweet to those who have no experience of it. But the experienced man trembles exceedingly in his heart at its approach.

Pindar

#54. We are so fortunate, as Australians, to have among us the oldest continuing cultures in human history. Cultures that link our nation with deepest antiquity. We have Aboriginal rock art in the Kimberley that is as ancient as the great Palaeolithic cave paintings at Altamira and Lascaux in Europe.

Kevin Rudd

#55. There exist continuation of time; past, present and future.

Lailah Gifty Akita

#56. Trees, for example, carry the memory of rainfall. In their rings we read ancient weather - storms, sunlight, and temperatures, the growing seasons of centuries. A forest shares a history, which each tree remembers even after it has been felled.

Anne Michaels

#57. Names of regions and countries change over time, and it is sometimes common to refer to ancient lands using names assigned to them later in history. However, this linguistic custom has typically been practiced only in the absence of other known and acceptable names for the places in question.

Shlomo Sand

#58. that's me. ancient history."

[Poseidon to Paul]

Rick Riordan

#59. If Morris and his contemporaries were possessed by the medieval Christian imagination and the ancient sagas, the moderns looked further back to the ancient world, and rewrote the Greek myths and legends to suit their own ideas about society and history.

A.S. Byatt

#60. A western audience might not appreciate 'Chanakya's Chant' because of its dependence on history and ancient statecraft. My book is a modern-day thriller that draws on a bedrock of history. My primary object is to entertain, not educate.

Ashwin Sanghi

#61. Human consciousness arose but a minute before midnight on the geological clock. Yet we mayflies try to bend an ancient world to our purposes, ignorant perhaps of the messages buried in its long history. Let us hope that we are still in the early morning of our April day.

Stephen Jay Gould

#62. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.

Karl Marx

#63. Even men of the noblest possible moral character are extremely susceptible to the influence of the physical charms of others. Modern, no less then Ancient History, supplies us with many most painful examples of what I refer to. If it were not so, indeed, History would be quite unreadable.

Oscar Wilde

#64. The deciphering of ancient scripts changed forever the way Europeans were able to imagine the story of humanity, destroying centuries of received authority about the past with repercussions as important for our understanding of time and history as the geological studies of the same period.

Neil MacGregor

#65. I'm a big history buff so to walk the streets ... the ancient world like that was pretty astounding.

Leonardo DiCaprio

#66. The sight of so many ruins destroys any desire to build shanties; all this ancient dust makes one indifferent to fame.

Gustave Flaubert

#67. I've got a lot of shows under my belt that are ancient history solely because they were on the air before this video revolution came along and ensured that canceled shows could continue to have a bit of a presence.

Jim Beaver

#68. Schwaller de Lubicz identifies the Golden Mean as "the fundamental scission," or division of one into two, that creates three things - the original whole and two parts, one in golden proportion to the whole and the other in golden proportion to that.

Richard Heath

#69. The progress of democracy seems irresistible, because it is the most uniform, the most ancient and the most permanent tendency which is to be found in history.

Alexis De Tocqueville

#70. I have long been interested in landscape history, and when younger and more robust I used to do much tramping of the English landscape in search of ancient field systems, drove roads, indications of prehistoric settlement.

Penelope Lively

#71. Fashion is not just about trends. It's about political history. You can trace it from the ancient Romans to probably until the '80s, and you can see defining moments that were due either to revolutions or changes in politics.

Daphne Guinness

#72. He who wishes to preserve, often destroys, so that virtue seems vice, and vice seems virtue.

Guglielmo Ferrero

#73. He who writes well runs the civilization. Everyone else does the grunt work.

Kenneth W. Harl

#74. We've got to map all of our ancient history before it's gone because, let's face it, if we don't have a common heritage to share, something to get excited about, then what are we living for?

Sarah Parcak

#75. People whose concept of ancient history is the first series of Star Trek may be treated with patience, because it's usually not their fault they were reduced to getting their education from school.

Terry Pratchett

#76. Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [ ... ] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.

James Henry Breasted

#77. I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.

Hilary Kornblith

#78. There was an ancient Roman lawyer, of great fame in the history of Roman jurisprudence, whom they called Cui Bono, from his having first introduced into judicial proceedings the argument, What end or object could the party have had in the act with which he is accused.

Edmund Burke

#79. I'm a total nerd, so I'm on my telescope, or I read a lot. I'm very inspired by ancient history.

Michelle Phan

#80. History of India From Ancient Times to the 20th Century by William W. Hunter

William W. Hunter

#81. Polygamy has an ancient history and is legal in many parts of the world. I find the rules of polygamy to be damaging and it's potentially dangerous to young girls and terrible for "excess" boys. But polyamory is supposed to be a more equal arrangement among agreeing adults.

Emily Yoffe

#82. I suppose I felt doomed to be an artist early on because of the way I drew all over the books that I needed for school, from ancient history to math. I was more interested in drawing in the margins than actually doing the work.

Nancy Spero

#83. Oh dear, you are confusing molecular science with ancient history.

Dean Hamer

#84. Can any one be so indifferent or idle as not to care to know by what means, and under what kind of polity, almost the whole inhabited world was conquered and
brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome, and that too within a period of not quite fifty-three years?

Polybius

#85. With ancient history writers most immediately in view, the author indicates tendency to look to the virtues and vices of individuals when seeking causes.

Peter Heather

#86. You have not studied the histories of ancient times, and perhaps know not the life that breathes in them; a soul of beauty and wisdom which had penetrated my heart of hearts.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

#87. In a country like France, so ancient, their history is full of outstanding people, so they carry a heavy weight on their back. Who could write in French after Proust or Flaubert?

Manuel Puig

#88. When the injured humerus is accompanied by a serious rupture of the overlying soft tissue the injury is regarded as fatal.

James Henry Breasted

#89. Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more modern. It is written as if the specator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.

Henry David Thoreau

#90. There is, of course, only one chosen nation. But Abraham Lincoln would call America 'an almost chosen nation' because he believed that America had a providential role to play in history, inspired by the example of God's ancient covenant people.

Meir Soloveichik

#91. Since ancient times artists and architects have seen in the golden mean the most aesthetically satisfying geometric ratio.

Stephen M. Barr

#92. I love studying Ancient History and seeing how empires rise and fall, sowing the seeds of their own destruction.

Martin Scorsese

#93. I guess high school really is ancient history, she concludes.
Ancient history? Have you really relegated us to the trash heap of the Dumb High-School Romance? And if that's the case, why the hell can't I do the same?

Gayle Forman

#94. From food trucks to hot dog stands to county fair favorites, 'street food' has enjoyed a rich and storied history in American cuisine. However, street food has been around for thousands of years. In fact, street food is believed to have originated as far back as Ancient Rome.

Homaro Cantu

#95. The very names we use to describe ancient ideas or vanished forms of social organization would be quite meaningless if we had not known living men.

Marc Bloch

#96. The attention given to the side of the head which has received the injury, in connection with a specific reference to the side of the body nervously affected, is in itself evidence that in this case the ancient surgeon was already beginning observations on the localization of functions in the brain.

James Henry Breasted

#97. We may be entering a new phase of history, a time when we begin to rediscover ... the traditional teaching that power must entail restraint and responsibility, the ancient awareness that we are interdependent with all of nature and that our sense of community must take in the whole of creation.

Donald Worster

#98. At her funeral, Diana's brother observed, 'Of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this--- a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of our modern age.

Kris Waldherr

#99. The ruin of Paganism, in the age of Theodosius, is perhaps the only example of the total extirpation of any ancient and popular superstition; and may therefore deserve to be considered, as a singular event in the history of the human mind.

Edward Gibbon

#100. Don't you have a class this morning, Georgie?"
Day mumbled something that sounded like
"Ancient History of the Near East and Greece."
"Poof!" scoffed Everhart, flourishing his fork,
"Come with me and see the Near East.

Jack Kerouac

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