Quotes About History

I do not bring forgiveness with me, nor forgetfulness. The only ones who can forgive are dead the living have no right to forget.

everything has a past. Everything – a person, an object, a word, everything. If you don't know the past, you can't understand the present and plan properly for the future.

History teaches us that the capacity for things to get worse is limitless.

Americans generally think of Pol Pot as some kind of unique, self-generated monster and his "killing fields" as an inexplicable atavism totally divorced from civilization. But without the United States government's Vietnam-era savagery, he could never have come to power in a culture like Cambodia's

What did former slaves become once emancipated?12 That second question is easy to miss if we assume that the only two conditions a person could occupy were either enslavement or full inclusion within the American polity complete with enjoyment of equal rights, or, in other words, citizenship as we currently conceptualize it.

the idea that the U.S. government would treat with an enslaved person directly as a person and not indirectly as the possession of a white property owner simply made no sense. Yet here were hundreds, and then thousands, and then tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of exactly such people, right in the lap of the Union army, the most obvious embodiment of the U.S. government outside the White House

The African continent has always been more queer than generally acknowledged.

It is important to note that we did not emerge into patriarchal religion from a dark, chaotic, immature period of primitivism; Goddess-centered cultures, including Minoan Crete, were highly evolved.

As Elizabeth Fisher pointed out in Woman's Creation, human history's first and longest reigning social unit was the mother and child, not the husband and wife.

All the lessons of history in four sentences: Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power. The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small. The bee fertilizes the flower it robs. When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.

He condemned monarchy itself as a system which had laid the world "in blood and ashes.

The negro population grew by leaps and bounds, until on the eve of the Revolution it amounted to more than half a million. In five states—Maryland, Virginia, the two Carolinas, and Georgia—the slaves nearly equalled or actually exceeded the whites in number. In South Carolina they formed almost two-thirds of the population. Even in the Middle colonies of Delaware and Pennsylvania about one-fifth of the inhabitants were from Africa.

Years later, my friend, Attorney W. T. Skoll of Spokane, Washington, showed me the new volume of the Federal Reporter, Vol. 61, p. 163, containing the decisions rendered on the Mudsill mine-salting case, and Mr. Skoll informed me that this was the only mine-salting case ever passed on by the Circuit Judges of the United States. Thus did the Mudsill mine-salting operation end, and become part of our law history to be used as a precedent in future mine-salting cases.

However, the most striking evidence of Brahmanical hostility towards Buddhism comes in the form of silence: the way in which India's Buddhist history, extending over large parts of the country and lasting for many centuries, was excised from the historical record.

This travelling was never about gaining merit or the absolution of sins. It was always the journey that mattered, and what these travels could tell me about the country and its history – a history so alluring, so epic as to keep drawing me back. There is so damn much of it, and so much still unexamined, still disputed, still buried and waiting to be brought back into the light.

As they approached Dhauli the elephant refused to go forward; nothing that Mark or the mahout did could persuade her to cross the open ground in front of them. Only then did Mark learn that they had come to the Kalinga battlefield, on which hundreds of war elephants are said to have died.

History is a symphony of echoes heard and unheard. It is a poem with events as verses.

You need only reflect that one of the best ways to get yourself a reputation as a dangerous citizen these days is to go about repeating the very phrases which our founding fathers used in the great struggle for independence.

Two weeks later, fire bombs destroyed Peiper's house and killed the sixty-year-old former commander of Kampfgruppe Peiper.

I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old.

You can't reconstruct a story—you can't even know what the story is—if everyone is saying, "Mistakes were made." Who made them? Everybody made them and no one did, and it's history anyway, so let's forget about it. Every story is a history, however, and when there is no comprehensible story, there is no history.

Every day is a new day when filled with dawn feeling, a virgin day, until it gets fucked up by human activity and becomes history.

Weather is so nineteenth-century in its effects

think how the world would've turned out if Hitler had gotten into art school, thought Lucien.