Quotes About History

Carrots were originally white and purple, and the sweeter orange variety was created by Dutch horticulturalists in the sixteenth century as a tribute to William I, Prince of Orange.

According to Chinese tradition, the first cup of tea was brewed by the emperor Shen Nung, whose reign is traditionally dated to 2737–2697 BCE.

THOMASINA: But then the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace with the enemy who burned the great library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for all that is overdue!

Don't clap too loudly—it's a very old world.

If Beethoven had been killed in a plane crash at the age of 22, it would have changed the history of music... and of aviation.

anyone with a secretary knows that what Catullus really wrote was already corrupt by the time it was copied twice...

Tom Stoppard's other work includes: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, After Magritte, The Real Thing, Enter A Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love. Arcadia

Le goût juif, the French said.

Siempre el pasado llega y se va sin importarle lo que deja.

But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.

I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life.

I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack and no power on earth could lift the arm that held the needle.

Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks' hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

He wants to put his story next to hers...'We got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kinda tomorrow.

cemetery as old as sky

And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose.

The mind of him that knew her own. Her story was bearable because it was his as well—to tell, to refine and tell again.

The price of wealth, historically, has been blood, annihilation, death, and despair.

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. "Floods" is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. —Toni Morrison, "The Site of Memory

There are no innocent white people, because every one of them is a potential nigger-killer, if not an actual one.

Virginia law, in 1831, is instructive and representative.

That is what indices are like, of course. Not the fan-shaped spread of rice bursting from a gunnysack. Not the thunder roll of barrels of turpentine cascading down a plank. And not a seventeen-year-old girl with a tree-shaped scar on her knee—and a name. History is percentiles, the thoughts of great men, and the description of eras. Does the girl know that the reason that she died in the sea or in a twenty-foot slop pit on a ship named Jesus is because that was her era?

Tolstoy was wrong. Kings are not the slaves of history. History is the slave of kings.