Quotes About History

Tant que les lions n'auront pas leurs propres historiens, l'histoire de la chasse glorifiera toujours le chasseur

This does not in any way close the argument for the development of African languages by the intervention of writers and governments. But we do not have to falsify our history in the process. That would be playing politics. The words of the Czech novelist Kundera should ring in our ears: Those who seek power passionately do so not to change the present or the future but the past—to rewrite history. There is no cause for writers to join their ranks.

Whether the rendezvous of separate histories will take place in a grand, harmonious concourse or be fraught with bitterness and acrimony will all depend on whether we have learned to recognize one another's presence and are ready to accord human respect to every people.

When a tradition gathers enough strength to go on for centuries, you don't just turn it off one day.

God has never sat around biting his nails, wondering what Hitler and Pol Pot and Saddam Hussein were going to do.

But when you want to mark a number on an abacus, what do you do if there are no stones in a column? The number 60 is one wedge in the sixties column and no wedges in the ones column. How do you write "no wedges"? The Babylonians needed a placeholder that represented nothing. They had to, in effect, invent zero. And so they created a new character, with no value, to signify an empty column. They denoted it with two slanted wedges.

Indeed, the very word "zero" has Indian origins: The Indian word for zero was sunya, meaning "empty," which the Arabs turned into sifr. Western scholars Latinized this into zephirus, the root of our zero.

Por primera vez en la historia, los productos de mayor éxito y los nichos están en un mismo nivel económico, simples

Even a magnificent city such as Florence becomes more intriguing if there is a demon at work in the alleys.

But history does matter. There is a line connecting the Armenians and the Jews and the Cambodians and the Serbs and the Rwandans.

When this war was over, he and his family--all Germans--were going to have to live with the black mark of this (whatever this was) for a long, long time.

A cemetery is a history of people -a perpetual record of yesterday and sanctuary of peace and quiet today. A cemetery exists because crcrv life is worth loving and rc nrcnrbcrirli-alm111s. - WILLIAM GLADSTONE, PRIME MINISTER OF ENGLAND, 1890

The United States of Andrew Jackson or George Washington is not the United States of Frederick Douglass or Sitting Bull. But we present our history from the perspective of the winners, from those in power

Those who suffer from historical amnesia, the belief that we are unique in history and have nothing to learn from the past, remain children. They live in an illusion.

Totalitarian states use propaganda to orchestrate historical amnesia, a state-induced stupidity. The object is to make sure the populace does not remember what it means to be free. And once a population does not remember what it means to be free, it does not react when freedom is stripped from it.

The historian Will Durant calculated that there have only been twenty-nine years in all of human history during which a war was not underway somewhere.

Until there is a common vocabulary and a shared historical memory, there is no peace in any society, only an absence of war... The search for a common narrative must, at times, be forced upon a society. Few societies seem able to do this willingly.

Permanent War One of the most pathetic aspects of human history is that every civilization expresses itself most pretentiously, compounds its partial and universal values most convincingly, and claims immortality for its finite existence at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun. —REINHOLD NIEBUHR, Beyond Tragedy

The elite, and those who work for them, were never taught how to question the assumptions of their age. The socially important knowledge and cultural ideas embodied in history, literature, philosophy, and religion, which are at their core subversive and threatening to authority, have been banished from public discourse.

Human history is not the battle of good struggling to overcome evil. It is a battle fought by a great evil struggling to crush a small kernel of human kindness. But if what is human in human beings has not been destroyed even now, then evil will never conquer.13

the disparity now gripping the United States is an inevitable consequence of white Americans' steadfast failure to confront where they came from, who they are, and the lies and myths they use to mask past and present crimes. History "is not the past," the film quotes Baldwin as saying. "History is the present. We carry our history with us. To think otherwise is criminal.

As it has done throughout American history, the state, under siege, will turn to extrajudicial groups of armed thugs to repress populist movements. Radical change in America is paid for with blood.

I'm just one generation between someone who cheered when Germans were burning and someone who doesn't even know that there is a border. That's a miracle - really is a miracle - and it gets me really emotional.

It was one of those great miracles of history that they managed to smuggle an Enigma machines out to Britain just before they were invaded by the Nazis.