Historical Comparison Quotes

Only in the Roman Empire and in Spain under Arab domination has culture been a potent factor. Under the Arab, the standard attained was wholly admirable; to Spain flocked the greatest scientists, thinkers, astronomers, and mathematicians of the world, and side by side there flourished a spirit of sweet human tolerance and a sense of purist chivalry. Then with the advent of Christianity, came the barbarians.

I wish I could bring Stonehenge to Nyasaland to show there was a time when Britain had a savage culture.

The difference between slaves in Roman and Ottoman days and today's employees is that slaves did not need to flatter their boss.

War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.

Science has done more for the development of western civilization in one hundred years than Christianity did in eighteen hundred years.

Look at South Africa, the former Soviet Union, and the Middle East. They still have many problems, setbacks as well as breakthroughs, but basically changes have happened that were considered unthinkable a decade ago.

If I were born in the 1700s, I would look like a rounded man.

In all my study of history, I have never found a time or place I would rather have lived than now.

These days we think our politics are nasty and partisan. But our discourse looks like a Platonic symposium compared with the vicious fighting that marked the early Republic.

Today's Russia is not to be compared with the Soviet Union of back then.

Libertarians are essentially what the Republicans were 30 years ago. Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan. They'd all fit more under the Libertarian label than the modern day Republican label.

What happened in America in the 1860s was a war of secession, a war of independence, no different in principle from what happened in America in the 1770s and 1780s.

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.

Almost everybody today believes that nothing in economic history has ever moved as fast as, or had a greater impact than, the Information Revolution. But the Industrial Revolution moved at least as fast in the same time span, and had probably an equal impact if not a greater one.

The number of Loyalist émigrés who fled the United States ultimately exceeded the number of Frenchmen who fled their revolution.

We're in this period where we're getting good data rates. I would say we're getting data rates that are like the data rates we got when we launched RealAudio in 1995.

The deficit is potentially Ronald Reagan’s Vietnam.

I was always obsessed with ancient Egypt, but any time you go back to wouldn't be as good for women as now - so it might be a quick visit.

The Trump administration is shaping up to be one of the most corrupt since the Gilded Age.

What happened to the America we grew up in, the America of Truman, Ike, JFK and Reagan?

Half the world’s people fail to receive the level of water services available in many of the cities of ancient Greece and Rome

No medieval monarch in the whole of British history ever had such power as every modern British Prime Minister.

The exploration of the planets is now closer to us in time than the exploration of Africa by Stanley and Livingstone.

The old always think the world is getting worse; it is for the young, equipped with historical facts, to point out that, compared with 1509, or even 1939, life in 2009 is sweet as honey.

[I have] concerns [about] the character of the foreigners now resorting to our shores. Fifty, even thirty years ago, there was a rightful presumption regarding the average immigrant that he was among the most enterprising, thrifty, alert, adventurous, and courageous of the community from which he came. It required no small energy, prudence, forethought, and pains to conduct the inquiries relating to his migration, to accumulate the necessary means, and to find his way across the Atlantic. To-day the presumption is completely reversed.