Quotes About History

For a quarter of a century we watched National Socialism stealing our name and using it to cover naked aggression. Few of us are likely to be deceived a second time.

Where savage beasts in forest midnight roam, Seeking in sorrow for each other's joy. Even while he was helping to win a war, Lanny hated that war and all others; he hated the lies he had to tell fully as much as those he had to hear. He was a man with a divided mind, and this put him at a disadvantage with men like these Nazis, who were never troubled with doubts and had consigned all scruples to the dustbin of history.

Lanny thought it was just as well that F.D.R. didn't have to undergo the ordeal of another interview with that hysterical Frenchman, who called himself a successor to Joan of Arc and whose mind had come straight out of that period of history.

When they get through, the country will be in the hands of the very same men who financed Hitler and who will have no idea in the world but to finance some new 'strong' government to keep the Socialists from winning an election.

The history of Germany is becoming a melodrama," wrote the Jewish financier. "In times to come people will refuse to believe it.

No, there had to be a new set of ideas to account for this creature, which, during a period of nine months, had been repeating the history of life on this planet over a period of many millions of years. It had consciousness, and had—or was—what people called a "soul." It would

About The Memory of Silence: If it contributes to a better understanding of the contemporary history of Cuba and its diaspora, as well as the sufferings of all the peoples separated by ideologies or displaced by wars and other conflicts, all my efforts in writing it will be more than compensated.

It is in Paris that the beating of Europe's heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities.

To awaken to history was to cease to live instinctively. It was to begin to see oneself and one's group the way the outside world saw one; and it was to know a kind of rage. India was now full of this rage. There had been a general awakening. But everyone awakened first to his own group or community; every group thought itself unique in its awakening; and every group sought to separate its rage from the rage of other groups.

Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

If it was Europe that gave us on the coast some idea of our history, it was Europe, I feel, that also introduced us to the lie. Those of us who had been in that part of Africa before the Europeans had never lied about ourselves. Not because we were moral. We didn't lie because we never assessed ourselves and didn't think there was anything for us to lie about; we were people who simply did what we did.

Neither my father nor grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past. I remember hearing from my grandfather that he had once shipped a boatful of slaves as a cargo of rubber. He couldn't tell me when he had done this. It was just there in his memory, floating around, without date or other association, as an unusual event in an uneventful life.

No civilization was so little equipped to cope with the outside world; no country was so easily raided and plundered, and learned so little from its disasters.

I thought: How dare you lecture me about history and loyalty, you slave? We have paid bitterly for people like you. Who have you ever been loyal to, apart from yourself and your family and your caste?

The Europeans wanted gold and slaves, like everybody else; but at the same time they wanted statues put up to themselves as people who had done good things for the slaves.

to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled.

Everywhere else men are in movement, the world is in movement, and the past can only cause pain.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfatehr could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

When we had come no one could tell me. We were not that kind of people. We simply lived; we did what was expected of us, what we had seen the previous generation do. We never asked why; we never recorded. We felt in our bones that we were a very old people; but we seemed to have no means of gauging the passing of time. Neither my father nor my grandfather could put dates to their stories. Not because they had forgotten or were confused; the past was simply the past.

Wouldn't it have been better for Muslims to trust less to the saving faith and to sit down hard-headedly to work out institutions? Wasn't that an essential part of the history of civilization, after all: the conversion of ethical ideals into institutions?

The world carried no witness to Mr Biswas's birth and early years.

ancestors, perhaps as friends, perhaps as foes—we do not know. Nor again do we know why they vanished, although given our species' dismal record as responsible stewards of nature, it's a decent bet that we drove them to extinction.

American draft horses reached their highest number in 1915, at 21.4 million animals, but mule numbers peaked only in 1925 and 1926, at 5.9 million (USBC 1975).

material for the records. The rubber was soon replaced by shellac, and that material was used