Quotes About History

Tell me about your family, I said. And so she did. I listened intently as my mother went through each branch of the tree. Years later, after the funeral, Maria had asked me questions about the family - who was related to whom - and I struggled. I couldn't remember. A big chunk of our history had been buried with my mother. You should never let your past disappear that way.

Things that happen before you are born still affect you... And people who come before your time affect you as well. We move through places everyday that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time - we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

A long time. Right on time. Out of time. Mind the time. Be on time. Spare time. Keep time. Stall for time. There are as many expressions with time as there are minutes in a day. But once, there was no word for it at all. Because no one was counting.

When we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.

Why humans kill each other is beyond my comprehension, but I can testify that you have been doing it since your inception. Only the weapons change.

But every family is a ghost story. The dead sit at our tables long after they have gone.

None of us can undo what we've done, or relive a life already recorded.

Remember this, Annie. When we build, we build on the shoulders of those who came before us. And when we fall apart, those who came before us help put us back together.

Things that happen before you are born still affect you, she said. And people who come before your time affect you as well. We move through places every day that would never have been if not for those who came before us. Our workplaces, where we spend so much time -- we often think they began with our arrival. That's not true.

This is how a legacy is built. One memory at a time.

With the chance to do what none in life ever get to do, he did not waver. He changed the history of his footsteps.

No one is certain who invented the telephone. Although the U.S. patent belongs to the Scottish-born Alexander Graham Bell, many believe he stole it away from an American inventor named Elisha Gray. Others maintain that an Italian named Manzetti or a Frenchman named Bourseul or a German named Reis or another Italian named Meucci deserves credit.

Can you even spell your great-great grandparent's names?

Every family is a ghost story.

Most religions warn against war, yet more wars have been fought over religion than perhaps anything else.

My grandparents did these things. My parents, too. If I take the pattern and throw it out, what does that say about their lives? Or mine? From generation to generation, these rituals are how we remain…" He rolled his hand, searching for the word. Connected? I said.

I'm looking for the oldest pocket watch you have.

But behind all your stories is always your mother's story, because hers is where yours begins.

Myth took the place of objectively conceived history. Myth, Michel Tournier has said, is "history everyone already knows."2 As such, history becomes nothing but a tool of the present, with no integrity whatsoever of its own.

The ruins proclaim the building was beautiful.

But surely it is the gist that matters; I am, after all, telling you a history, and in history, as I suspect you—an American—will agree, it is the thrust of one's narrative that counts, not the accuracy of one's details.

like Pakistan, America is, after all, a former English colony...

Lahore, the second largest city of Pakistan, ancient capital of the Punjab, home to nearly as many people as New York, layered like a sedimentary plain with the accreted history of invaders from the Aryans to the Mongols to the British.

What did I think of Princeton? Well, the answer to that question requires a story. When I first arrived, I looked around me at the Gothic buildings — younger, I later learned, than many of the mosques of this city, but made through acid treatment and ingenious stone-masonry to look older...