Historical Connections Quotes

Russia is Germany's most important neighbor in the East, and it will remain so.

Since ancient times, people from throughout Asia have brought to Japan their talents, knowledge and energy, helping to lay the basis for Japan's existence as a country.

Tom Hanks, who starred in 'The Da Vinci Code,' turns out to be related to a number of the historic characters that feature in 'The Da Vinci Code,' including William the Conqueror and Shakespeare.

The Germans form one of the most important branches of the Indo-Germanic or Aryan race - a division of the human family which also includes the Hindoos, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Celts, and the Slavonic tribes.

Where are the links of the chain ... joining us to the past?

There was a place I visited in Lahore that felt to me like old Delhi, and I'm sure Pakistanis who come from Lahore to Delhi feel the same.

The people of India and Arabia have interacted across the waters between them for thousands of years.

In a way, being born is a sort of ecological contagion. When you have longevity of family, we remember our grandfathers and maybe our great-grandfathers. We somehow don't have the capacity in modern life to remember further than that. All of the ramifications of their lives have an effect on us, and we're not aware of it.

Okay, NATO expanded to East Berlin and East Germany. Under [Bill] Clinton NATO expanded further, to the former Russian satellites. In 2008 NATO formally made an offer to Ukraine to join NATO. That's unbelievable. I mean, Ukraine is the geopolitical heartland of Russian concern, quite aside from historical connections, population and so on.

Every year, millions of people from Iran and Iraq travel to each other's countries, and we also have marriages between Iraqis and Iranians. Many Iranians were born in Iraq, and many Iraqis were born in Iran. This is a kind of special, cordial amicable ties.

In terms of the idea of long-term occupation - I have been reading a little bit more about this period - and you can see in that occupation are many lessons for the current occupation of Iraq. So we have these connections that go way back that people aren't aware of.

Trying to recreate for people the ways in which the past was similar to the present is an important part of what a historian has to do, and what a student of foreign policy has to do.

Whether we consciously realize it or not, the biodiversity with which we are most familiar, and the biodiversity with which we have most intimate historical, cultural and biological connections, is that associated with food plants.

Even before Europe was united in an economic level or was conceived at the level of economic interests and trade, it was culture that united all the countries of Europe. The arts, literature, music are the connecting link of Europe.

But now all of a sudden some idiots in Taiwan start to say that they are not Chinese. Their grand parents were Chinese. But for some reason, they feel they are not Chinese.

The way we make history exciting to learn about is by breaking down the barriers that are already set up between these people.

Few Iranians these days go through the fiction of calling themselves 'Persian.' Calling yourself Persian is a way of distancing themselves from Iran.

In my last I contended that none of those ties which are necessary to bind a people together and make them one, existed between the colonists and Mexicans.

It always struck me as pretty cool that people who changed the world often knew each other. After reading them separately, hearing that David Hume and Adam Smith were friends made sense.

You don't have to be brought up in a grand house to have a sense of the past, and I truly believe that there are certain people to whom or through whom the territory - the place, the past - speaks.

The time seems right for a new conception of association within the Commonwealth, not necessarily owing allegiance to the Crown, especially for those countries which have no ties of blood, culture, or religion

I always had my roots in the past.

I think there is a lot of continuity between the Jewish and the Islamic traditions. We know this historically, though people don't want to talk about that - especially Muslims. There is a common source for both Judaism and Islam, or let's say that Islam finds its source in Judaism. The commonalities of practice and sensibility, ethos and mythos, create a lot of overlap.

My family has been rooted and intertwined with Jerusalem for generations, and I am among those who say every day, 'May You return to Your city, Jerusalem, with compassion.'

It takes a perverse determination to drain that instinctive curiosity away and make history seem just remote, dead and disconnected from our contemporary reality. Conversely, it just takes skilful storytelling to recharge that connection to make the past come alive in our present.