Quotes About History

If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth. This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce

Kader was the worst fire in industrial history, taking more lives than the Triangle Shirtwaist Company fire that killed 146 young workers in New York City in 1911. The parallels between Triangle and Kader — separated from each other by half a world, and eighty-two years of so-called development — are chilling: it was as if time hadn't moved forward, but had simply shifted locations.

The bottom line is this: As we get clean, we have to get fair. More than that, as we get clean, we can begin to redress the founding crimes of our nations: Land theft, genocide, slavery.

Most of us chose to oppose the war as an act of folly by a president who mistook himself for a king, and his British sidekick who wanted to be on the winning side of history. There was little interest in the idea that war was a rational policy choice, that the architects of the invasion had unleashed ferocious violence because they could not crack open the closed economies of the Middle East by peaceful means, that the level of terror was proportional to what was at stake.

That he won at all is the result of an electoral college system originally designed to protect the power of slave owners.

Ask him: History knocked on your door, did you answer?

O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.

Even when mundanes didn't have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn't really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn't drag a witch to the stake; you'd have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead.

They all claim to have been built by the author of the Golden Stone sutras, this guy named Purochana who some wizard historians believe was the guy of that name who also shows up in the Mahabharata, more or less working for the prince of Gandhara.

One day when I was ten one of our neighbors came to the house and said that the tsar was dead and when I asked what ir meant they said that there would be a new tsar. So I did not really see why a tsar mattered.

Even when mundanes didn't have science to helpfully explain the world and happily burned witches at the stake, they didn't really believe in magic. If you believed in magic, you wouldn't drag a witch to the stake; you'd have her lob fireballs at your enemies instead.

Omer took a deep breath and stood up. 'It's a bad history without a doubt, he said. Nothing to be proud of.' He closed his eyes, turning his face to the side, right into the sun. 'So what are we going to do about it?' Then he opened his eyes, made a little bow, and put his hand out toward the avenue, as if to offer her the street.

The sea, the sky, the air see us as trouble.   They're right of course. We see each other as the landmarks of a day.   History doesn't see us. It doesn't see us at all.   From this we should draw one ounce of relief. At

Dieting is the most potent political sedative in women's history; a quietly mad population is a tractable one.

Marina Warner's Monuments and Maidens explains how it comes about that individual men's names and faces are enshrined in monuments, supported by identical, anonymous (and beautiful) stone women.

Nor has the beauty myth always been this way. Though the pairing of the older rich men with young, "beautiful" women is taken to be somehow inevitable, in the matriarchal Goddess religions that dominated the Mediterranean from about 25,000 B.C.E. to about 700 B.C.E., the situation was reversed:

Most of our assumptions about the way women have always thought about "beauty" date from no earlier than the 1830s, when the cult of domesticity was first consolidated and the beauty index invented.

It was the softest, sneakiest coup in history.

Their goal is to subvert Western cultural norms and ultimately to alienate Western children from their families' influence and from Western history and freedoms generally.

As Carlyle put it—"All that mankind has done, thought, gained or been—it is lying in matchless preservation in the pages of books.

I tell you the past is a bucket of ashes.

Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo. Shovel them under and let me work-- I am the grass; I cover all. And pile them high at Gettysburg And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun. Shovel them under and let me work. Two years, ten years, and the passengers ask the conductor: What place is this? Where are we now? I am the grass. Let me work.

To a man across a thousand years I offer a handshake. I say to him: Brother, make the story short, for the stretch of a thousand years is short.

Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped around your tongue today And broken to shape and thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now.