Quotes About History

When I was growing up here, slavery was hardly ever mentioned," said Regina. "Or people would say that the slaves were happy and well looked after, and the Civil War was about states' rights and honor. You still hear that, of course, but we are finally making some progress. The best thing we can do about our awful history is to acknowledge it openly and honestly.

Alan Lomax recordings of the prisoners singing

There were no slaves in Natchez," she insisted haughtily. "We had field hands on our plantations, of course, but they were out of town or across the river. Here in Natchez, we had servants and we loved them. They were part of our families.

In closing I want to remind you yet again of Pasteur's remark, "Luck favors the prepared mind." Yes, it is a matter of luck just what you do; it is much less luck you will do something if you prepare yourself to succeed. "Creativity" is just another name for the great successes which make a difference in history.

the Dreadnought's predecessors of the King Edward VII class with a standard displacement of 16,350 tons could steam at 18.5 knots with 18,000 h.p. from their reciprocating engines; Dreadnought, of 17,900 tons, steamed 21.6 knots on her trials from 23,000 h.p.

a considerable portion of the appalling loss of British life was due to the destruction of the old armoured cruisers which had no business at Jutland

Britain's second batch of three battle cruisers (still called armoured cruisers) was laid down from February, 1909, to June, 1910. They were as disappointing and conservative as the Colossus and Orion classes of battleship, and can be regarded as the worst ships built for the Royal Navy during the Fisher era.

Narrative history fell out of fashion for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, as historians everywhere focused on analytical approaches derived mainly from the social sciences. But a variety of recent, large-scale narrative histories have shown that it can be done without sacrificing analytical rigour or explanatory power.

People make their own history, as Karl Marx once memorably observed, but not under conditions of their own choosing.

In Hamburg on 30 April 1945, hearing of Hitler's death, which she believed to have been caused by his having poisoned himself, Luise Solmitz at last felt free to release the hatred that she had been building up for him over the previous months. He was, she wrote in her diary, 'the shabbiest failure in world history'. He was 'uncompromising, unbridled, irresponsible', qualities that had at first brought him success but then led to catastrophe. 'National

Three generations of imbeciles are enough," Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes declared in an opinion upholding the constitutionality of such a law.

The way I see it, anyone who's proud of their country is either a thug or just hasn't read enough history yet.

There were always the stories, of course, the war legends, but who— other than himself, in Jhesh's tavern, increasingly wearily—still told those?

They killed us twenty thousand years ago with their crops and their craven connivance at hierarchy.

She and Torres have history all over the place. Stuck together in the data like tissues on a lap dance cabin floor.

The cost of contemplating history is often an uneasy conscience.

White Americans cannot deny their long history of abusive transactions with people of color. These offenses, it should be noted out of fairness, can be explained in part by the fact that no other sizable national state has ever been formed from the confluence of so many diverse ethnic streams. All our heterogeneous ferment no doubt made contentiousness inevitable.

That act, on December 7, 1787, is perhaps Delaware's sole claim to distinction as a champion of democracy. Certainly it was long hostile to the Negro, probably longer and more defiantly so than any other state outside of the Confederacy.

No better example of the price of economic dependency may be culled from U.S. history than the sustained erosion of the African American's civil rights.

Scholars have estimated that by 1850, the aboriginal population in North America—besieged by the invaders' explosive weaponry, wondrous technology, contemptuous cruelty, and irresistible pathogens, as well as the Indians' own ever-deepening despair—was just one-tenth of what it had been when Columbus first ventured ashore.

Americans, from the beginning and throughout much of their history, were a warrior people when dealing with those who stood in their path.

In the twenty years following the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 3,000 lynchings occurred.

Yet only a little more than $5 million—$1.25 per capita—was spent to compensate for 200 years of ignorance enforced on a whole transplanted people.

I suddenly discovered that cooking was a rich and layered and endlessly fascinating subject. The best way to describe it is to say that I fell in love with French food- the tastes, the processes, the history, the endless variations, the rigorous discipline, the creativity, the wonderful people, the equipment, the rituals.