Quotes About History

We cannot overstate our debt to the Past, but the moment has the supreme claim.

We are always coming up with the emphatic facts of history in our private experience and verifying them here. All history becomes subjective; in other words, there is properly no history; only biography.

Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke and Bacon were only young men in libraries when they wrote these books.

Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus.

Things added to things, as statistics, civil history, are inventories. Things used as language are inexhaustibly attractive.

Many of the historical proverbs have a doubtful paternity.

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,Here once the embattled farmers stood,And fired the shot heard round the world.

They say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.

In his speeches on Azad Hind Radio, Subhas Bose referred to Gandhi as the 'Father of the Nation'. This seems to be the first time Gandhi was called this. The usage soon became ubiquitous.

Had Shastri been given another five years, there would have been no Nehru–Gandhi dynasty. Sanjay Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi would almost certainly still be alive, and in private life. The former would be a (failed) entrepreneur, the latter a recently retired airline pilot with a passion for photography. Finally, had Shastri lived longer, Sonia Gandhi would still be a devoted and loving housewife, and Rahul Gandhi perhaps a middle-level manager in a private sector company.

The Hindi novelist Phanishwaranath Renu returned the Padma Shri bestowed upon him by the government of India, the act recalling Tagore's disavowal of his knighthood after the Jallianwala Bagh massacre.

While economics played a role, so did individuals, and one individual in particular. The official history underestimated the personal charisma of Mohandas K. Gandhi. His name, and his methods, fired the popular imagination. It was he who conceived of and led the campaign against the Rowlatt Act, he who conceived and led non-cooperation, he, who, by making common cause with the Muslims on the Khilafat, brought India's two major communities together against the Raj.

what is now in the past was once in the future'. There

Sir Jadunath Sarkar

Asian Relations Conference

Ramachandra Guha

But the history of independent India has remained a field mostly untilled. If history is 'formally constituted knowledge of the past', then for the period since 1947 this knowledge practically does not exist.

At no other time or place in human history have social conflicts been so richly diverse, so vigorously articulated, so eloquently manifest in art and literature or adressed with such directness by the political system and the media.

Kuomintang leader Chiang Kaishek

History is really a record of every interruption of the even working of love or of the soul.

India incorporates a greater variety of religions (whether born in its soil or imported) than any other nation in human history.

By 1888 the British were so solidly established in India that they could anticipate, if not a thousand-year Raj, at least a rule that extended well beyond their own lifetimes.

To understand the future course of this war, one need only look at the history of the War on Drugs and the War on Terror. Like those two manufactured "wars", this one will be never-ending, freedom-destroying, counterproductive, and ultimately understood to have caused far more damage than the supposed threat it was aimed at ever could have.

Every attempt through history to limit the definition of humanity has been a prelude to the subjugation, degradation, and slaughter of innocents.