Quotes About History

The stumbling stones document what larger memorials cannot show: that the terror began not in far-off Poland, but in the heart of a city full of clubs and cafés, spaces where you can still buy a lottery ticket or go to the dentist. Each four-inch square recalls an ordinary human being, in the midst of her life, who was deported and murdered with little notice and no protest from the other ordinary human beings who surrounded her every day. The terror was here.

What is certain: it's good that those deeds have been marked and preserved. Imagine a world where the greatest crimes ever committed were consigned to dust. Where nothing acknowledged racist terror of any kind—the Holocaust, the genocides, the lynchings were left without a trace. Whatever helps us escape oblivion is welcome.

Forget the past and move on isn't even helpful in the realms of individual psychology; as political advice, it is worthless. When pasts fester, they become open wounds.

I doubt that anyone in town belongs to the Klan, or even its more respectable cousin, the White Citizens' Council. They'd simply prefer to leave the past unexamined, cover it with honeysuckle, and go back to their bourbon. It's the kind of response that ensures no one will reflect on the ways that past seeps into present.

The monuments were not innocuous shrines to history; they were provocative assertions of white supremacy at moments when its defenders felt under threat. Knowing when they were built is part of knowing why they were built.

What can other countries learn from the German experience? "To look at your own country as if it were a foreign one. It's crucial to have a broken relationship to your past, to be ready to see your own history with shame and horror.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory. It's like taking away the ability to remember your dreams. Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

In total, four hundred thousand books in Central Library were destroyed in the fire. An additional seven hundred thousand were badly damaged by either smoke or water or, in many cases, both. The number of books destroyed or spoiled was equal to the entirety of fifteen typical branch libraries. It was the greatest loss to any public library in the history of the United States.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown.

The art critic and philosopher John Berger once said that we like to look at animals because it reminds us of the past and the  agrarian life that included the regular presence of animals.

The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power.

The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

The last and final burning, which erased it from history forever, occurred in AD 640. By that time, the library was awe-inspiring and a little scary. People had begun to believe it was a living thing—an enormous, infinite communal brain containing all the existing knowledge in the entire world, with the potential for the sort of independent intelligence we now fear in supercomputers.

German poet Heinrich Heine [warned], 'There where one burns books, one in the end burns men.

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history. The Nazis alone destroyed an estimated hundred million books during their twelve years in power. Book burning was, as author George Orwell remarked, "the most characteristic [Nazi] activity.

On April 29, 1986, the day the library burned

World War II destroyed more books and libraries than any event in human history.

Taking books away from a culture is to take away its shared memory.

The film industry began in 1910 with the production of D. W. Griffith's movie In Old California and grew by bounds.

one more piece of the bigger puzzle the library is always seeking to assemble—the looping, unending story of who we are.

Interest in having a library in town persevered, and in 1872, an association formed to establish a library in the city. To raise money, the association sponsored a "Dickens Party," which partygoers attended dressed as their favorite Charles Dickens character. The party lasted for a full week. Hints to Horse-keepers and On the Sheep Industry were purchased with proceeds of the party.

judicial bonfires, and even household stoves." The first recorded instance of book burning was in 213 BC, when Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang decided to incinerate any history books that contradicted his version of the past. In addition, he buried more than four hundred scholars alive.

The block had small offices and an outdoor arena where weekly slave-labor auctions were held. The slavery was permitted under an 1850 California law that allowed white people to buy Native American children as "apprentices," and to "bid" on Native Americans who were declared "vagrant," and oblige them to work off the cost of the bid. (The law, known as Act for the Government and Protection of Indians, was not repealed entirely until 1937.)