Quotes About History

My destiny has been that I remember and must weave together, must plait into one cable the many threads, the thin, the thick, the broken, the enduring of our long history, of our tumultuous and varied day. There is always more to be understood; a discord to be listened for; a falsity to be reprimanded.

La historia de la oposición masculina a la emancipación de las mujeres quizá sea más interesante que la propia historia de la emancipación

When the guns fired in August 1914, did the faces of men and women show so plain in each other's eyes that romance was killed?

For it is a perennial puzzle why no woman wrote a word of that extraordinary literature when every other man, it seemed, was capable of song or sonnet.

Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations. They have been out and about, on people's lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are stored with other meanings, with other memories, and they have contracted so many famous marriages in the past.

Yet few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

Shakespeare could not have written without Marlowe, or Marlowe without Chaucer, or Chaucer without those forgotten poets who paved the ways and tamed the natural saveragery of the tongue. For masterpieces are not single and solitary births; they are the outcome of many years of thinking in common, of thinking by the body of the people, so that the experience of the mass is behind the single voice.

These old houses are only brick and wood, soaked in human sweat, grained with human dirt.

What, indeed, if you look from a mountain-top down the long wastes of the ages? The very stone one kicks with one's boot will outlast Shakespeare.

And as it went on I set it against the background of that other talk, and as I matched the two together I had no doubt that one was the descendant, the legitimate heir of the other.

Women have had less intellectual freedom than the sons of Athenian slaves.

Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown.

La historia de la oposición de los hombres a la emancipación de las mujeres es más interesante quizá que el relato de la emancipación misma.

La libertad intelectual depende de cosas materiales. La poesía depende de la libertad intelectual. Y las mujeres siempre han sido pobres, no sólo durante doscientos años, sino desde el principio de los tiempos.

The history of most women is] hidden either by silence, or by flourishes and ornaments that amount to silence.

I have lived a thousand lives already. Every day I unbury--I dig up. I find relics of myself in the sand that women made thousands of years ago...

Y hay una mujer detrás del mostrador; preferiría leer su historia verdadera antes que la centésima quincuagésima vida de Napoleón o el septuagésimo estudio de Keats y su uso de la inversión miltoniana que en este momento están redactando el viejo profesor Z y sus homólogos.

Yet even when they were freed from the practical impediments imposed upon their sex, they could not write because they had no tradition to follow. No sentence had been shaped, by long labor, to express the experience of women.

If Shakespeare had never existed, he asked, would the world have differed much from what it is today?

Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle.

So accurately does history repeat itself.

Bisogna poi aggiungere che la storia più importante di Catania non è quella dei costumi, del commercio, degli edifici e delle rivolte, ma la storia degli sguardi. La vita della città è piena di avvenimenti, amicizie, risse, amori, insulti, solo negli sguardi che corrono fra uomini e donne; nel resto, è povera e noiosa.

The Scandinavian king St Olaf made his subjects choose between baptism or death.

Commonsense has trampled down many a gentle genius whose eyes had delighted in a too early moonbeam of some too early truth; commonsense has back-kicked dirt at the loveliest of queer paintings because a blue tree seemed madness to its well-meaning hoof; commonsense has prompted ugly but strong nations to crush their fair but frail neighbors the moment a gap in history offered a chance that it would have been ridiculous not to exploit.