Quotes About History

Le Streghe non conoscono le origini del loro culto.

It was originally intended to be a mildly nostalgic account of the natural history of the island

Art endures long after the tyrants who pay for it are dust. He

History is a pack of lies about events that never happened told by people who weren't even there. — George Santanaya As

That Jews and Christians, together with Muslims, can live in amity, respecting differences while honoring commonalities—that this is no pipe dream—is proven by the fact that, for centuries, they did just that. —James Carroll1

My mother's mother's family moved north from Mexico after having migrated from Spain, from Portugal, from Ireland, and likely from an Indian village somewhere.

After her [Grandma's] death in the great flu epidemic of 1918, Grandpa had remarried a woman remembered without warmth by everyone in the family.

Mythology can be defined as the sacred history of humankind. This is different from what we call "history." Mythical stories, when you trace them back to their origin, often have a sacredness, a holy quality that comes from the bedrock of lore from which they emerged.

if everything that is happening in the world is traceable to our inability to understand what is happening in the world.  If there is such a thing as original sin, it's the human capacity to get everything wrong, right from the beginning and all the way up to now, and that's what the old storytellers have been telling us, including the Creek Indians who told this story along with every other tribe on earth. 

Who are you?" [Bryce] asked in a hoarse whisper "Nathaniel Gorham." The man waited, expectantly, then his face fell. "You don't recognize it?" Bryce could do no more than shake his head. "Figures. If I'd said George Washington or Benjamin Franklin then you would have perked up. But Nathaniel Gorham? No... My name's right there next to theirs... At the bottom of the Constitution. Big as life, just like Ben's and General Washington's.

Well, there are all of the names you would recognize - Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Tom Paine, Paul Revere. There are over three hundred of us, actually. I wish all were as well known to this generation as the others. Every one played a part - along with thousands of others whose names are no in any history books.

Every generation has tended to look on the past with an air of condescension. I call it history snobbery, and your generation is smitten with one of the worst cases ever.

Eventually 400,000 Germans were sterilized, and the Vatican did not issue a Pastoral Letter against it for another decade, only after the tide of the war had begun to turn against the Nazis).23,I

Thirty-four companies—many of them still household names today, like Krupp, AEG Telefunken, Siemens, Bayer, and IG Farben—made fortunes from the tortured labor of Jews, Russians, Poles, some Allied prisoners of war, and German prisoners of conscience.

History and experience tell us that moral progress comes not in comfortable and complacent times, but out of trial and confusion.

My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over. (On succeeding Richard M Nixon as president)

Decidedly, the stories that turn the tribes tragic are not their own stories.

Nothing changes more constantly than the past; for the past that influences our lives does not consist of what happened, but of what men believe happened.

There's just so many great stories in the past that you can know a little bit about, but you can't know it all, and that's where imagination can work.

I asked once, and the library assistant told me there were more than a hundred thousand books there, and more than sixty million pages of documents. It's a good number, I think: ten pages for every person who died. A kind of monument in paper for people who have no gravestones.

the book has survived the same human disaster over and over again. Think about it. You've got a society where people tolerate difference, like Spain in the Convivencia, and everything's humming along: creative, prosperous. Then somehow this fear, this hate, this need to demonize 'the other'--it just sort of rears up and smashes the whole society. Inquisition, Nazis, extremist Serb nationalists...same old, same old.

The thing that most attracts me to historical fiction is taking the factual record as far as it is known, using that as scaffolding, and then letting imagination build the structure that fills in those things we can never find out for sure.

I was struck, as always, that a heathen poet from long ago should know so much of the human heart, and how little that heart changes, though great cities fall and new dispensations sweep away the old and pagan creeds.

I don't rightly know who was my great-grandfather, much less his father. How come you know that about a horse?