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Quotes About History

There are other ways women have been made to disappear. There is the business of naming.In some cultures women keep their names, but in most their children take the father's name, and in the English-speaking world until very recently, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Bronte and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Roads are a record of those who have gone before.
~ Rebecca Solnit
In mountaineering, if] we look for private experience rather than public history, even getting to the top becomes an optional narrative rather than the main point, and those who only wander in high places become part of the story.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Eduardo Galeano notes that America was conquered, but not discovered, that the men who arrived with a religion to impose and dreams of gold never really knew where they were, and that this discovery is still taking place in our time.
~ Rebecca Solnit
To me, the grounds for hope are simply that we don't know what will happen next, and that the unlikely and the unimaginable transpire quite regularly. And that the unofficial history of the world shows that dedicated individuals and popular movements can shape history and have, though how and when we might win and how long it takes is not predictable.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Recently, a lot of Americans have swapped the awkward phrase 'same-sex marriage' for the term 'marriage equality'. This phrase is ordinarily implied to mean that same-sex couples will have the rights different-sexed couples do. But it could also mean that marriage is between equals. That's not what traditional marriage was. Throughout much of history in the west, the laws defining marriage made the husband essentially an owner and the wife a possession. Or the man a boss and the woman a slave.
~ Rebecca Solnit
I was arguing not that everyone should read books by ladies—though shifting the balance matters—but that maybe the whole point of reading is to be able to explore and also transcend your gender (and race and class and orientation and nationality and moment in history and age and ability) and experience being others.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Listen: you are not yourself, you are crowds of others, you are as leaky a vessel as was ever made, you have spent vast amounts of your life as someone else, as people who died long ago, as people who never lived, as strangers you never met.
~ Rebecca Solnit
We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision. And yet, of course, everything in the mainstream media suggests that popular resistance is ridiculous, pointless, or criminal, unless it is far away, was long ago, or, ideally, both. These are the forces that prefer the giant remain asleep.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Words travel, because the word arctic comes from arktos, Greek for bear. Cancer comes from the Greek word for crab, karkinos. Memory, or one of its locations in the brain, the hippocampus, means seahorse. A bestiary is buried in our language.
~ Rebecca Solnit
There's a public equivalent to private depression, a sense that the nation or the society rather than the individual is stuck. Things don't always change for the better, but they change, and we can play a role in that change if we act. Which is where hope comes in, and memory, the collective memory we call history.
~ Rebecca Solnit
world until very recently, married women were addressed by their husbands' names, prefaced by Mrs. You stopped, for example, being Charlotte Brontë and became Mrs. Arthur Nicholls. Names erased a woman's genealogy and even her existence.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Cause-and-effect assumes history marches forward, but history is not an army. It is a crab scuttling sideways, a drip of soft water wearing away stone, an earthquake breaking centuries of tension. Sometimes
~ Rebecca Solnit
Much fuss has been made over the idea of the frontier, as though it were a line advancing east to west, but the West was settled piece meal, and Indians fled in many directions to escape the tightening noose of the railroad lines and towns.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Whose maps are we trying to read? And what are we trying to draw? It's so common to live in a place without truly knowing its history, its systems, and the people who are different from you and who move through different versions of the city.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Few remember that there was no significant US homeless population before the 1980s, that Ronald Reagan's new society and economy created these swollen ranks of street people. Even
~ Rebecca Solnit
Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments "when hope and history rhyme
~ Rebecca Solnit
For it's particularly when women speak up about sexual crimes that their right and capacity to speak come under attack. It seems almost reflexive at this point, and there is certainly a very clear pattern, one that has a history.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Eliminate your mother, then your two grandmothers, then your four great-grandmothers. Go back more generations and hundreds, then thousands disappear. Mothers vanish, and the fathers and mothers of those mothers. Ever more lives disappear as if unlived until you have narrowed a forest down to a tree, a web down to a line. This is what it takes to construct a linear narrative of blood or influence or meaning.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Most of my life, I would have doubted myself and backed down. Having public standing as a writer of history helped me stand my ground, but few women get that boost, and billions of women must be out there on this seven-billion-person planet being told that they are not reliable witnesses to their own lives, that the truth is not their property, now or ever.
~ Rebecca Solnit
James continued. "The only thing needed henceforward is to inflame the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.
~ Rebecca Solnit
Toda a gente é influenciada por coisas que precedem a educação formal, que saem do nada e da vida do dia a dia. A essas influências excluídas chamo avós.
~ Rebecca Solnit
The battle with Men Who Explain Things has trampled down many women—of my generation, of the up-and-coming generation we need so badly, here and in Pakistan and Bolivia and Java, not to speak of the countless women who came before me and were not allowed into the laboratory, or the library, or the conversation, or the revolution, or even the category called human.
~ Rebecca Solnit