Quotes About History

Two Winter Walks 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.

What gives me hope is that human history is full of examples of people across the ages who have risen to face the great challenges of their time and have succeeded. Victory is not the arrival in some promised land; it is the series of imperfect victories along the way that edge us closer to building the critical mass that eventually shifts the status quo.

The British judge William Blackstone wrote in 1765, in his influential commentary on English common law and, later, American law, "By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband.

Sometimes, cause and effect are centuries apart

Alguna vez las revoluciones fueron lo que pensamos que serían?

The dead must be remembered, but the living are the monument.

The utopias built by citizens like Anna Holshouser are not yet on that map. But they should be. [active during 1906 earthquake and fire in SF CA]

We write history with our feet and with our presence and our collective voice and vision.

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. Despair is a form of certainty, certainty that the future will be a lot like the present or will decline from it;

The rights of man" was one of the great phrases of the French Revolution, but it's always been questionable whether it included the rights of women.

Secondo me le basi della speranza sono, semplicemente: ignorare cosa succederà e sapere che l'improbabile e l'inimmaginabile accadranno con una certa regolarità. E che la storia non ufficiale nel mondo mostra come l'impegno degli individui e i movimenti popolari possano influenzarla e ottenere qualcosa, anche se non si può prevedere come e se ce la faremo, né quanto tempo ci vorrà.

I think sometimes that I became a historian because I didn't have a history, but also because I was interested in telling the truth in a family in which truth was an elusive entity.

On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day.

The traditional versions of history, the conventional sources of news encourage us to fix our gaze on that stage.

I have a friend whose family tree has been traced back a thousand years, but no women exist on it. She just discovered that she herself did not exist, but her brothers did.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. As {she} sat at the edge of {the lake}, memory blossoms floated unbounded, as though breathed, no words spoken. Like birds that fly across national borders, between countries at war at each other.

What Sidda did not know was how much more singing there was when Vivi was growing up. That's the kind of thing the history books don't tell you. How people sang outdoors all the time.

I don't care what the fire department says about fire hazards. I have lived through fire before.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers. (pg. 174)

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.

What would the United States be like if it had not those reservoirs of triumphant will-power, the historical facts of the War of Independence, of the giant American statesmen, and of the pioneering progress into the West, which every American citizen has at his mental command and into which he can plunge for revivification at any minute? To have a difficult history makes, perhaps, a people who are bound to be difficult in any conditions, lacking these means of refreshment.

A miner's terrace afforded little space for secret panels, priests' holes, escape tunnels. Even in persecution, the poor were disadvantaged.

De ontdekking van de toekomst is de ontdekking van het verleden.

I could tell that he had heard about me and that I would soon be a figure in the stories he would tell his grandchildren. A strange figure: The man who kept asking everyone about the yeti, and who himself looked like one. I did not want to know that tale, but I knew that it meant that the tale of the yeti - in some form - would exist forever. Storytellers die; their stories live on.