Quotes About History

Remember. Never forget.

new France. I pity them, and I fear what lies ahead.

On July 16 and 17, 1942, 13,152 Jews were arrested in Paris and the suburbs, deported and assassinated at Auschwitz. In the Vélodrome d'Hiver that once stood on this spot, 1,129 men, 2,916 women, and 4,115 children were

The old African proverb says, 'The ax forgets; the tree remembers.' I saw how horrifically it injured us to identify with our oppressors. If we were to keep our souls whole, we couldn't afford to forget. We had to remember.

White people say, "It beats digging a ditch"; black people say, "It beats picking cotton.

Ours was a love story, the kind that's not supposed to happen to black girls anymore. This was vintage romance made scarce after Dr. King, along with Negro-owned dress shops, drugstores, and cafeterias.

There is no fair fight to be waged about the past.

She also wondered why she wasn't able to care more about the important things happening in the world. There was the Vietnam War. She knew boys who had died, and there was always Dr. King, cold in the ground. Even though Willie Mae hadn't been bitten by a dog, she had been in Birmingham when the German shepherds were let loose. And where had Mother been when all of this was going on? She was busy learning to be a wife.

As we made our way to the grave, I marveled at how a town so small had accumulated so many dead.

Our past is never past & there is no such thing as moving on...

Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we'll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were — ordinary people — and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.

The fact that they came to our land, I know not why, does that mean we should poison our present and our future? Sooner or later they will leave our country, just as many people throughout history left many countries. The railways, ships, hospitals, factories and schools will be ours and we'll speak their language without either a sense of guilt or a sense of gratitude. Once again we shall be as we were - ordinary people - and if we are lies we shall be lies of our own making.

It is a stern fact of history that no nation that rushed to the abyss ever turned back. Not ever, in the long history of the world. We are now on the edge of the abyss. Can we, for the first time in history, turn back? It is up to you. ~Taylor Caldwell

Were Cicero alive in the America of today he would be aghast and appalled. He would find it so familiar.

As Aristotle said, long before Christ, a people who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. It is obvious that we are repeating it today.

Las guerras originan guerras, como las cigarras crían cigarras y siempre habrá hombres ambiciosos.

Los hombres no aprenden las lecciones del pasado.

Nazi headquarters

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

The past has left its traces on the world, and we only have to know how to read them.

Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do.

People are made of stories

seal cylinder.