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Quotes of the Day for 27 April 2005 - History

Edward Gibbon was born at Putney, Surrey, now part of London, on this day in 1837. Due to ill health he had little formal education but had access to a large library and read avidly. He went to Magdalen College, Oxford but didn't fit. When he converted to Roman Catholicism he was expelled and his scandalized father sent him to board with a Protestant minister at Lausanne, Switzerland to continue his education and break him of his "Papish errors". While there he learned French and met Voltaire. After serving two years in the militia he undertook his "Grand Tour" and was inspired by ruins in Rome to undertake to learn and record the history of that city and the empire it spawned, "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". While some points have been debated, the million and a half words and 8,000 footnotes set a standard for history that has rarely been met. Thus we have a few thoughts today on History.

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
     - Abba Eban, 1915 - 2002

For most of history, Unknown was a woman.
     - Virginia Woolf, 1882 - 1941

I found one day in school a boy of medium size ill-treating a smaller boy. I expostulated, but he replied: 'The bigs hit me, so I hit the babies; that's fair.' In these words he epitomized the history of the human race.
     - Bertrand Russell, Education and the Social Order

When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right.
     - Eugene V. Debs, 1855 - 1926

What experience and history teach is this - that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
     - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, 1770 - 1831

One of the lessons of history is that nothing is often a good thing to do and always a clever thing to say.
     - Will Durant, 1885 - 1981

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