Quotes About History

Books are a sort of cultural DNA, the code for who, as a society, we are, and what we know.

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.

people of the book.

The biggest library fire in American history had been upstaged by the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown. The books burned while most of us were waiting to see if we were about to witness the end of the world.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

Over the years, he has become a sort of library himsel: He is the repository of endless stories about the library's most interesting patrons.

A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone.

Work helped distract him from his morbid state of mind. The library wasn't his biggest project, but he was exhilarated by it. He approached it with a kind of freedom he had never experienced before. He believed that its design could fuse everything he had learned and loved in the visual world into a monument to things he valued most: history, books, philosophy, design, aspiration, creativity.

Destroying a culture's books is sentencing it to something worse than death: It is sentencing it to seem as if it never lived.

It wasn't that time stopped in the library. It was as if it were captured, collected here, and in all libraries -- and not only my time, my life, but all human time as well. In the library, time is dammed up--not just stopped but saved.

The link between foreign-exchange transactions, art, and armaments hadn't gone unnoticed by Hoover.

History matters. Facts matter. But above all else, context matters. Changing history and facts—canceling them as if they did not exist or changing them to suit some twenty-first-century weaponized truism is another form of propaganda and lie.

There was no city, no London, just beacon fires on all three sacred mounds.

Anything in history or nature that can be described as changing steadily can be seen as heading toward catastrophe.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

The past itself, as historical change continues to accelerate, has become the most surreal of subjects -- making it possible to see a new beauty in what is vanishing.

Mozart, Pascal, Boolean algebra, Shakespeare, parliamentary government, baroque churches, Newton, the emancipation of women, Kant, Balanchine ballets, et al. don't redeem what this particular civilization has wrought upon the world. The white race is the cancer of human history.

We are the result of the love of thousands.

lynchings between 1900 and the 1950s, to the murders during the civil rights movement, to killings that happen right now. This moment.

Only memory cannot be burned.

The people who lived along the Nile were called Egyptians. Early in Egypt's history, there were two Egyptian tribes who lived along the Nile. The Egyptians who lived in the north, in the Nile Delta, were called the "Lower Egyptians." The Egyptians who lived along the straight part of the river, further south, were called the "Upper Egyptians.

See Chapter 37 for more on BC/BCE and AD/CE.

Susan Wise Bauer

The Great Fire of London] hesitated, and it finally began to flicker out. But four-fifths of London had been burned...Londoner John Evelyn, weeping, wrote in his diary, "London was, but is no more.