Historical Facts Quotes

When I found out that there was eight Presidents before George Washington, I wanted to smack somebody.

I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we're drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author.

Public hangings [in England] were abolished in 1868. The last one took place outside Newgate Prison on 26 May of that same year. The man hanged was an Irish terrorist called Michael Barratt who had blown up the Clerkenwell House of Detention killing six people. A drunken crowd stayed up all night to witness the execution. They cheered wildly when the scaffold was brought out at dawn. More people – mainly young women and children – began to arrive. By the time a bell was sounded at eight o’clock in the morning to announce the arrival of the condemned man, the crowd stretched back as far as Smithfield.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

The Persian King Darius I ordered the crucifixion of 3,000 Babylonians in about 519 BC.

Story and plot, not historical facts, are the engine of a novel, but I was committed to working through the grain of actual history and coming to something, an overall effect, which approximated truth.

In England, the ultimate execution method for men who committed high treason was hanging, drawing, and quartering. It was considered indecent at the time to mutilate a woman’s body in this way, so female traitors were burnt at the stake.

Given the knee-jerk patriotism of recent war movies, it's discouraging to see 'Windtalkers' evade pertinent facts that could have recast the doubled-edged issues of racism and loyalty and made them relevant to contemporary times.

Christianity is a very historical religion - it makes specific claims that are open to testing.

History may never have all the facts, but history always has the last word.

I like historical things; I like researching things.

Yes, there were gas chambers. Millions of Jews died. There is no question. I don't know the figures. I'm not an expert on the Holocaust.

The Romans learned about crucifixion from the Greeks, although they noted that many of the ‘barbarian’ races (Indians, Assyrians, Scythians, and Celts) also used it.

There were more Americans in the British Army during the Revolution than there were in the American Army.

Several loafers were lynched in Natchez last week upon various charges instituted by the Kangaroo court. The times grow warm; we can see another storm coming, not unlike that which prevailed in the days of the Murrel excitement. In Natchez, as in New Orleans, they are driving away all of the free negroes. What is a Kangaroo court, neighbor?

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 am fond of history and am very well contented to take the false with the true. In the principal facts they have sources of intelligence in former histories and records, which may be as much depended on, I conclude, as anything that does not actually pass under ones own observation; and as for the little embellishments you speak of, they are embellishments, and I like them as such.

The bodies of victims were ... the hangman’s property. Although obliged to sell the corpses of murderers to surgeons for dissection purposes, the executioner sometimes sold them back to the families if they offered a better price. It was often difficult to keep the body intact as the crowd would grab pieces as macabre souvenirs. On 18 December 1758, a riot broke out when the medics fought the family for possession of the victim’s body – however, the mob won and carried the corpse away in triumph. The hangman would also be allowed to cut up the rope that was used in the execution and sell bits off in the pubs on Fleet Street.

Everybody has forgotten that Russia helped start the Second World War.

The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward Tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were The open borders position may sound new and radical, but it is simply a call for the return of lost liberties. When the Statue of Liberty was erected in 1886, most of the world’s borders could be freely crossed without passports. Passport requirements had sometimes existed before and were still in place in backward tsarist Russia, but the more liberal governments of advanced European nations regulated migration, as modern democracies regulate speech, only rather lightly and in exceptional cases, if at all. Comprehensive restrictions on international movement, which almost everyone today regards as a normal and necessary government function, are really an innovation of the twentieth century, which emerged as liberalism gave way to nationalism and socialism in the wake of World War I. Although the reasons for border control were often explicitly racist—such as the national origins quotas of the 1924 U.S. Immigration Act—the restrictions were also motivated by bona fide national security concerns, as well as a desire to protect native wages and welfare states from immigrant competition and foreign dependents.

Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right.

Miracles have no claim whatever to the character of historical facts and are wholly invalid as evidence of any revelation.

Acts themselves alone are history, and these are neither the exclusive property of Hume, Gibbon nor Voltaire, Echard, Rapin, Plutarch, nor Herodotus. Tell me the Acts, O historian, and leave me to reason upon them as I please; away with your reasoning and your rubbish. All that is not action is not worth reading.

To give credit to Lincoln for moral progression seems beyond the facts and unnecessary for our appreciation of this arguably greatest of all American presidents.

I can't rewrite history.