Quotes About History

It's pronounced Wike, but yeah. They've been players in this city since back in the day. You're talking some stone-cold original Dutch motherfuckers. As in, charging the Lenape Indians rent on their own land type shit.

Since when do white people care about reason? They gonna put that cop in jail? The bartender looked up from his racing form. Put a white cop in jail for killing a black boy? Believe in the fucking tooth fairy. Buford knows what's up, Pepper said. Newspapers talking about 'looting,' Buford continued. Should ask the Indians about looting. This whole country's founded on taking other people's shit. How'd they fill their museums? Tutankhamun.

Hard to believe that reconstruction had progressed so far that clock-watching had returned, the slacker's code, the concept of weekend.

It struck me that distant cities are designed precisely so you can know where you came from.

The repeated lies become history, but they don't necessarily become the truth. The person we know at first, [she thinks] is not the one we know at last.

What monstrous things, our pasts, especially when they have been lovely.

there was always hunger in Ireland. She was a country that liked to be hurt. The Irish heaped coals of fire upon their own heads. They were unable to extinguish the fire. They were dependent,as always, on others. They had no notions of self-reliance. They burned and then poured empty buckets down upon themselves. It had always been so.

Once upon a time and long ago, in fact so long ago that I couldn't have been there, and I wasn't there, but I'll tell you anyways: once upon a time and long ago...

We return to the lives of those who have gone before us, a perplexing mobius strip, until we come home, eventually, to ourselves.

Sometimes you've got to go up to a very high floor to see what the past has done to the present.

There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past.

There isn't a story in the world that isn't in part, at least, addressed to the past. I

I am German forever, German 'nationalist'. The nazis are un-German.

Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?" In response, I asked her if she had knives in her kitchen, and when she answered that she did, I acted dismayed and shocked, exclaiming, How can you still use knives after so many killers have used them to stab and murder their victims?

And if there is a fundamental difference between the way people perceived the world around them in the past and the way they perceive it at present, then it is perhaps best identified as follows: in the past, activism was coupled with optimism, while today activism requires pessimism.

La historia nos brindó la oportunidad de conocer la naturaleza humana quizá como ninguna otra generación. ¿Qué es, en realidad, el hombre? Es el ser que siempre decide lo que es. Es quien ha inventado las cámaras de gas, pero también el que ha entrado en ellas con paso firme, musitando una oración

Thank heaven, Sigmund Freud was spared knowing the concentration camps from the inside. His subjects lay on a couch designed in the plush style of Victorian culture, not in the filth of Auschwitz.

Auschwitz—the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres.

An American woman once confronted me with the reproach, "How can you still write some of your books in German, Adolf Hitler's language?

We have rescued it into the past wherein it has been safely delivered and deposited. In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost, but rather, on the contrary, everything is irrevocably stored and treasured.

So, let us be alert—alert in a twofold sense: Since Auschwitz we know what man is capable of. And since Hiroshima we know what is at stake.

In the past, nothing is irretrievably lost but everything irrevocably stored.

E]very human task is an eternal one and human progress is endless, an advance into infinity, toward a goal located in infinity. And even then it is a matter only of each individual's progress in his own personal history.