Quotes About History

James A. Michener

James A. Michener

From the beginning of history there have been mothers, and mothers have sons.

James A. Michener

That's the thing about time travel — you're always moving forward, even when you go back.

Those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it... but those who remember the future can plan ahead for the weather.

the only thing that gets results is action. Not a single ounce of greatness in history ended with thoughts. It happened with hands. With actions.

Humans are smarter now than they were 40,000 years ago.

Storytelling has worked for 5000 years. It's not going to stop now just because we have blogs and tweets.

Know from whence you came. If you know whence you came, there are absolutely no limitations to where you can go.

People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

To accept one's past - one's history - is not the same things as drowning in it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

History is not a procession of illustrious people. It's about what happens to a people. Millions of anonymous people is what history is about.

American history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it.

The great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.

When the white man came to Africa, the white man had the Bible and the African had the land, but now it is the white man who is being, reluctantly and bloodily, separated from the land, and the African who is still attempting to digest or to vomit up the Bible.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am also so much more than that. So are we all.

I am what time, circumstance, history, have made of me, certainly, but I am, also, much more than that. So are we all.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we are literally criminals. I attest to this: the world is not white; it never was white, cannot be white. White is a metaphor for power, and that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.

To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning it it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought.

America sometimes resembles, at least from the point of view of a black man, an exceedingly monotonous minstrel show; the same dances, same music, same jokes. One has done (or been) the show so long that one can do it in one's own sleep.

All the western nations are caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism: this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

In the context of the Negro problem neither whites nor blacks, for excellent reasons of their own, have the faintest desire to look back; but I think that the past is all that makes the present coherent, and further, that the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.

Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys doctrines by proving them to be untrue.