Quotes About History

Little by little the head emerged, preserved by the sludge for about 2,500 years. There it was–the biggest ivory head ever found: a soft, pale brownish colour, the hair black, the faintly coloured lips with the enigmatic smile of one of the maidens of the Akropolis. The Lady of the Well–the Mona Lisa, as the Iraqi Director of Antiquities insisted on calling her–she has her place now in the new museum at Baghdad: one of the most exciting things ever to be found. There

Even God cannot change the past.

This only is denied to God the power to undo the past.

The Holocaust is a central event in many people's lives, but it has also become a metaphor for our century. There cannot be an end to speaking and writing about it.

Le passé en lui-même est un très mauvais matériau pour la littérature. La littérature est un présent brûlant, non au sens journalistique, mais comme une aspiration à transcender le temps en une présence éternelle

Since they were unable to liberate themselves from the old words and the fear, they prowled the streets and cast their angry shadows.

Where are you from, Jews?" asked the rabbi as people used to ask in the old days. An ancient grief glazed his eyes.

How much is our life governed by the lives and past actions of others?

And Egypt?What is Egypt's strength? Her resilience? Her ability to Her ability to absorb people and events into the pores of her being? Is that true or is it just a consolation? A shifting of responsibility? And if it is true, how much can she absorb and still remain Egypt?

The building is rather like a medieval Castle and was established in the Sixth Century and soon afterwards, as the Moslem armies advanced Westwards from the Arabian Peninsula, somebody had the prescience to build a small Mosque in its courtyard to guard against it being burned or demolished. At the time of the Crusades it was the turn of the Monastery to protect the Mosque, and so it has been down the ages, each House of God extending its shelter to the other as opposing armies came and went.

The old language of colonialism surfaces once again.

I'm taken over by this trunk. I'm practically living inside it. When I read the journals I feel as if I'm there, a hundred years ago. I'm putting together the whole picture and I know everything that happened and wasn't written down - Amal, p. 133

The damage done by colonial powers to the heritage of conquered peoples is irreversible; yet racial memory is a collective storehouse that time and history cannot eradicate.

Until that time in history, Egypt was the only country among the Eastern nations to have adopted the custom of circumcision. (The practice had appeared early in Egyptian history, as can be seen from mummies.)

The biblical narrator was therefore at pains to conceal any family connections between Israel and Egypt.

When Allah had made the rest of the world, He saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and threw them down on to the earth. That was Afghanistan

When Allah had made the rest of the world, He saw that there was a lot of rubbish left over, bits and pieces and things that did not fit anywhere else. He collected them all together and threw them down on to the earth. That was Afghanistan,' the

At the end of things we turn into historians. Sometimes happy, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes regretful or bitter, sometimes to reassure ourselves that we have amounted to something, however small. And sometimes, as I am doing now, to try with the wisdom of hindsight to make sense of ourselves.

Between June and October the Americans, British and French ended the state of war with Germany

on 5th May, 1955, the Federal Republic became a fully sovereign state.

Some Germans argue to-day that the struggle between Adenauer and Schumacher was the making of modern German democracy.

Où veux-je en venir ? A cette idée : que nul ne colonise innocemment, que nul non plus ne colonise impunément ; qu'une nation qui colonise, qu'une civilisation qui justifie la colonisation - donc la force - est une civilisation malade, une civilisation moralement atteinte, qui, irrésistiblement, de conséquence à conséquence, de reniement en reniement, appelle son Hitler, je veux dire son châtiment.

Lors donc que Rome, dans cette prétendue marche triomphale vers la civilisation unique, eut détruit, l'une après l'autre, Carthage, l'Egypte, la Grèce, la Judée, la Perse, la Dacie, les Gaules, il arriva qu'elle avait dévoré elle-même les digues qui la protégeaient contre l'océan humain sous lequel elle devait périr.

the bourgeoisie is condemned to become every day more snarling, more openly ferocious, more shameless, more summarily barbarous; that it is an implacable law that every decadent class finds itself turned into a receptacle into which there flow all the dirty waters of history; that it is a universal law that before it disappears, every class must first disgrace itself completely, on all fronts, and that it is with their heads buried in the dunghill that dying societies utter their swan songs.