Quotes About History

Twenty years after we had left so fierce and proud, we were all right back where we had started, yoked to each other and the same old drama.

There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.

We all nourish truth with our tongues not in sour-batter words that never take shape nor line-driven stories bent to skirt the edge of our great exhaustion, desire, and doubt. We all use simply the words of our own lives to say what we really want, to lie spent on our lovers, put teeth to all we hate, to strain the juice of our history between what has been allowed and what has always been denied, the active desire to take hold of the root.

People want biography. People want memoir. They want you to tell them that the story you're telling them is true. The thing I'm telling you is true, but it did not always happen to me.

By the time that poem became the story "River of Names,"* I had made the decision to reverse that process: to claim my family, my true history, and to tell the truth not only about who I was but about the temptation to lie.

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

The war between England and Scotland was in its eighth year and there had been no raid for ten days: it had seemed possible to get married in peace.

Will Scott grinned. Grizel Beaton had slapped his face four times, and apart from these four small misjudgements, they had never touched on a topic more personal than which of Buccleuch's bastards to invite to the wedding. But he liked her fine; and she was good and broad where it would matter to future Buccleuchs, which summed up all his mind so far on the subject.

Every ruin is packed like a biscuit box.

Our motive in locking it, if it matters, was to spare you the embarrassment of an interruption. Unless the comte de Sevigny of today is really so different from the Master of Culter of ten years ago?' Perfectly at his ease, the decorative young man he was addressing leaned back on the shutters and studied him. 'I hope so,' Lymond said. 'When you were twenty, Mr Erskine, you killed a priest in the belltower at Montrose. Would you do so again?

If I were yourself, I would perhaps give him his head. He looks a meek enough child." "So did Heliogabalus at an early age," said Lymond. "And Attila and Torquemada and Nero and the man who invented the boot. The only thing they had in common was a cherubic adolescence. And red hair, of course, makes it worse.

You should know,' said Lord Grey, adjusting his sight to the folded paper he had just raised from his desk, ' that I am tied to the Hexham Saphronia, who combines total chastity with a jackal-like taste for digging up my family history. With twelve barons Grey to research she should be rendered peacefully harmless, with no sharp quality of heat, either biting the tongue or offending the head. She will also bring you a fortune in dowry.' He looked up.

Thomas, first Baron Wharton of Wharton, sat in his chair. "Boy," he said. "Listen to me, and learn the first lesson of man, the political animal. When you wage war, you wage it for ever. When war is over, it has never existed...

If they thought their sovereignty worth keeping, the handful of lords who divided Scotland between them must unite. And unite before religious division caught and struck them apart for ever.

On the day that his grannie was killed by the English, Sir William Scott the Younger of Buccleuch was at Melrose Abbey, marrying his aunt.

She wondered what archaeologists in the year A.D. 10,000 would find when they uncovered the relics of the twentieth century; would there, she wondered, be any signs of intelligence remaining? or only vestiges of folly and violence?

Perhaps [the critics are right and] the drama is played out now and Jesus is safely dead and buried. Perhaps. It is ironical and entertaining to consider that at least once in the world's history those words might have been said with complete conviction, and that was on the eve of the Resurrection.

Ah, well, as the old pagan said of the Gospels, after all, it was a long time ago, and we'll hope it wasn't true.

Women and elephants never forget.

I know this will come as a shock to you, Mr. Goldwyn, but in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.

I'm of the glamorous ladies At whose beckoning history shook. But you are a man, and see only my pan, So I stay at home with a book.

In 1907, Indiana became the first state to pass an involuntary sterilization law, empowering state institutions to sterilize, without consent, criminals and "imbeciles" whose condition was "pronounced unimprovable" by a panel of physicians.

Slaveholders were willing to overwork pregnant slaves at the expense of the health of both mother and child.

Some slaveowners also practiced slave-breeding by compelling slaves they considered "prime stock" to mate in the hopes of producing children especially suited for labor or sale.