Historical Nostalgia Quotes

Some say that no one ever leaves Montreal, for that city, like Canada itself, is designed to preserve the past, a past that happened somewhere else.

New Orleans is not in the grip of a neurosis of a denied past; it passes out memories generously like a great lord; it doesn't have to pursue "the real thing."

As a community organizer who holds a degree in history, I understand the fascination with history. However, there is a tendency for many of us to get engrossed in the recounting of our history, which often amounts to purely intellectual activity without material action.

I was always fascinated, even as a child, by antiques and ancient times. I always felt I should have been born in the 17th or 18th century. They really had a big stone castle with authentic furniture.

I've never been happier to be born in this time than when I was wearing a corset.

We don't often look into these unpleasant details of our great struggle. We all prefer to think that every man who wore the blue or gray was a Philip Sidney at heart.

I totally have no love for that whole romance for that Antebellum time period.

My wife and I have always been Anglophiles. We always felt we were born in another life in England. I was in the Elizabethan era, and she was from the Norman conquest.

From depicting the past, so goes the suspicion, it is a short step to glorifying the past.

Americans have no past, so they buy the pasts of others.

An ideal museum show would be a mating of Brideshead Revisited with House & Garden, provoking intense and pleasurable nostalgia for a past that none of its audience has had.

I used to think I'd like to have been a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, experience untamed America.

I love reading about history. Sometimes, I feel I was born in the wrong era. There was more creativity in the air when people were still discovering new worlds.

Reality is never a golden age.

Of course everyone dreams of living in the 17th or the 18th century because of the costumes, but there were so many incommodities.

If we could all take a sober look at our history, then we would no longer see this nostalgic attitude to the Soviet past that predominates among the less affected part of our society.

I really think I'd have enjoyed the life of a Regency buck.

To complain of the age we live in, to murmur at the present possessors of power, to lament the past, to conceive extravagant hopes of the future, are the common dispositions of the greatest part of mankind.

History is another country and might be full of fascinating incidents and places to go visit - but as a destination for emigration, it has some problems!

There was a land of Cavaliers and Cotton Fields called the Old South. Here in this pretty world, Gallantry took its last bow. Here was the last ever to be seen of Knights and their Ladies Fair, of Master and of Slave. Look for it only in books, for it is no more than a dream remembered, a Civilization gone with the wind.

I would love to go back to any time in European history, especially in Irish history, to the second or third century, prior to the arrival of Christianity when Paganism flourished. I can always go back there in my imagination, of course. It doesn't cost anything, and it's a form of time travel, I suppose.

Our culture's obsession with vintage objects has rendered us unable to separate history from nostalgia. People want heart. They want a chaser of emotion with their aesthetics.

Thank God for the passing of the discomforts and vile cuisine of the age of chivalry!

All great people glorify their history and look back upon their early attainments with a spiritualized vision.