Quotes About Reconstruction

We know little about history beyond its public displays, and even then what we know is reconstructed.

She tried to reassemble herself, to resemble herself...

No longer can I bear with the ruined god, betrayed and beaten by his own magic. Calling on powers best left unsummoned, he took human beings apart—and then he put them back together again.

It may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.

Is it any coincidence that the plastic surgeons most interested in pushing breast reconstruction and most involved in the superficial aspects of women's breasts speak the language of sexist pigs?

In the same way that a tornado rips the roof off a double-wide trailer, leaving the occupants dazed and staring at the clouds from the splinters of what used to be their living room, it was over.

Hallorann saw a grave sort of beauty there that had been missing on the day he had first met her, some nine months ago. Then she had still been mostly girl. Now she was a woman, a human being who had been dragged around to the dark side of the moon and had come back able to put the pieces back together. But those pieces, Hallorann thought, they never fit just the same way again. Never in this world.

To .. all the dispossessed youth of Africa: for perpetuation of communion with ancestral spirits through the fight for African freedom, and in the firm faith that the dead, the living, and the unborn will unite to rebuild the destroyed shrines." ~from the dedication

As Georges Clemenceau, reporting on Reconstruction for a French newspaper, observed after the war, "Any Democrat who did not manage to hint that the negro is a degenerate gorilla would be considered lacking in enthusiasm."57

Postwar debts differed from prewar borrowing. New World borrowers spent nineteenth-century British loans on railroads and ranches, building the capacity to repay their lenders. Belligerent borrowers spent wartime American loans on shot and shell, destroying that capacity. Nations wounded in war borrowed more money to repay their debts, sometimes borrowing from America to pay other belligerents who in turn paid America.

In the 1960s the planning department of the London County Council, whose unofficial motto was Finishing What the Luftwaffe Started, decided that what London really needed was a series of orbital motorways driven through its heart.

In 1666, following an unfortunate workplace accident, the city of London burnt down.

the Molotov walkout" was a watershed. It made it "transparently clear that Russia was not interested in European reconstruction, but in chaos.

I regard remaking a film as creating something again.

The British are much more cynical and regard the idea of a Globe reconstruction as an Elizabethan Disneyland. But the Americans have a real hunger for what they see as their history, their culture and their Shakespeare.

It's so strange to think: A year ago today, I was undoing my husband. Now I am almost done reassembling him.

A scientist can hardly encounter anything more desirable than, just as a work is completed, to have its foundation give way.

culture—in the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson. Homer Plessy, a very light-skinned, racially mixed man, had made a planned attempt to challenge Louisiana's 1890 law requiring segregated streetcars. His lawyer, Albion Tourgee, a northern white Reconstruction official and popular novelist, had argued the case on the grounds that the government did not have the right to determine the racial identities of its citizens. But the Supreme Court decided

In the moment of shock there is little pain; pain began about three a.m., when I began to plan the life I had still somehow to live and to remember memories in order somehow to eliminate them. Happy memories are the worst, and I tried to remember the unhappy. I was practiced. I had lived all this before. I knew I could do what was necessary, but I was so much older—I felt I had little energy left to reconstruct.

Presumably she had an idea--women were appallingly practical: they built new plans at once out of the ruins of the old.

What is particularly striking about his reconstruction and criticisms of the traditional account of friendship is that he finds it deficient not only by the light of his own Christian viewpoint; he also finds friendship deficient when judged from the perspective of its own self-proclaimed ethical foundations. Thus, Kierkegaard concludes that the reciprocity involved in friendship actually betrays its essential selfishness.

Kipling: Where's your sense of humor? Rebis: We're working on reconstructing it...

I think the World Trade Center should be rebuilt as the World Trade Center, only stronger and one story taller. I hate what they're doing with the World Trade Center site.

As a result of the World War, this old Germany collapsed. It collapsed in its constitution, in its social order, in its economic structure. Its thinking and feeling changed.