Quotes About History

In the 1950s, Dr. Dorothy Brown, the first Black female general surgeon in the United States and a Tennessee state representative, became the first state legislator to introduce a bill to legalize abortion.

The American legal system is rooted in this monstrous combination of racial and gender domination. One of America's first laws concerned the status of children born to slave mothers and fathered by white men: a 1662 Virginia statute made these children slaves.3

Euginicists considered Southern Blacks to be especially unfit to breed based on a theory of "selective migration," which held that the more intelligent Blacks tended to migrate to the North, leaving the less intelligent ones behind. Selective migration was thought to explain the embarrassing finding that Blacks from Northern cities had scored higher on the army intelligence tests than some groups of Southern whites.

As Daniel Kevles observed, "a river of blood would eventually run from the sterilization law of 1933 to Auschwitz and Buchenwald." Eugenic policy may be motivated by many forms of domination. But history shows that it has a particular affinity for racial hatred.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner.

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo, we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

Those who study the complex interplay of cause and effect in the history of the Universe say that this sort of thing is going on all the time, but that we are powerless to prevent it. 'It's just life,' they say.

And that is what Mauritius is most famous for: the extinction of the dodo.

Your arrival on the planet has caused considerable excitement. It has already been hailed, so I gather, as the third most improbable event in the history of the Universe." "What were the first two?" "Oh, probably just coincidences

This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature. With the addition of this Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition, The Salmon of Doubt can now claim to have no less than three Introductions, one Prologue, and one Editor's Note.

Acontecimientos importantes de la Historia de la Galaxia, II: Desde los orígenes de esta Galaxia, grandes civilizaciones han surgido y desaparecido y muerto tan a menudo que resulta profundamente tentador pensar que la vida en ella debe ser a) algo así como un mareo, un vértigo en el espacio, en el tiempo, en la historia o cosa parecida, y b) estúpida.

We were wrong about trains, we were wrong about planes, we were wrong about radio, we were wrong about phones, we were wrong about . . . well, for a voluminous list of the things we have been wrong about, you could do worse than dig out a copy of a book called The Experts Speak by Christopher Cerf and Victor Navasky.

Never mind," said Ford. "Rome wasn't burned in a day.

There is no problem about changing the course of history—the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end. The

This Introduction to the Introduction to the New Edition is a highly significant one in the history of Introductions. Its presence on these pages means that this book has achieved the World Record for the Number of Introductions in a Book of This Nature.

It's easy to think that as a result of the extinction of the dodo we are now sadder and wiser, but there's a lot of evidence to suggest that we are merely sadder and better informed.

Since every piece of matter in the Universe is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in the Universe, it is in theory possible to extrapolate the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from, say, one small piece of fairy cake.

The history of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy is one of idealism, struggle, despair, passion, success, failure, and enormously long lunch-breaks.

Rome wasn't burned in a day.

thus was the Empire forged.

Look," said Zaphod, "will you get it into your heads? That's just a recorded message. It's millions of years old. It doesn't apply to us, get it?

So a lot of history is now gone for ever. The Campaign for Real Timers claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another. 'The past,' they say, 'is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.

When the Infinite Improbability Drive arrived and whole planets started unexpectedly turning into banana fruitcake, the great history faculty of the University of MaxiMegalon finally gave up, closed itself down and surrendered its buildings to the rapidly growing joint faculty of Divinity and Water Polo, which had been after them for years. Which