Quotes About History

But the very worst kind of collaboration was a French woman sleeping with a German. They were called the horizontal collaborationists.

All these buildings of Paris are treasures," said Lucien. "But

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

After some minutes of Grant trying to ease the situation by talking about the Mexican War, to which Lee responded in a polite, abstracted fashion, Lee reminded Grant of the reason for their meeting.

In a few minutes, Lee and Grant reached across to each other from their horses and shook hands. When they met again, Grant would be President of the United States, and Lee, in the great forgotten chapter of his life, would be doing more than any other American to heal the wounds of war.

Gen. Robert E. Lee was present, and, ignoring the action and presence of the negro, arose in his usual dignified and self-possessed manner, walked up the aisle to the chancel rail, and reverently knelt down to partake of the communion, and not far from the negro.

We finally drove the Germans back and we entered the Alsace-Lorraine region, which is part French and part German.

As hard as it is to believe today, people didn't really know that there was a mob organization in those days.

As Hoffa put it, "Nobody can describe the sit-down strikes, the riots, the fights that took place in the state of Michigan, particularly here in Detroit, unless they were a part of it." And on another occasion he said, "My scalp was laid open sufficiently wide to require stitches no less than six times during the first year I was business agent of Local 299. I was beaten up by cops or strikebreakers at least two dozen times that year." And

Once in a while Giancana would have a guy with him named Jack Ruby from Dallas. I met Jack Ruby a few times. I know Jimmy's kid met him, too, at the Edgewater. Ruby was with Giancana and he was with Red Dorfman. One time we all went out to eat and Ruby had a blond with him that he brought up from Dallas for Giancana. There is no doubt whatsoever that Jimmy Hoffa didn't just meet Jack Ruby, he knew Jack Ruby, and not just from Giancana, but from Red Dorfman, too.

We have wasted History like a bunch of drunks shooting dice back in the men's crapper of the local bar.

It is always easy for those living in the present to feel superior to those who lived in the past.

Much of this world vanished after Columbus, swept away by disease and subjugation. So thorough was the erasure that within a few generations neither conqueror nor conquered knew that this world had existed.

Voltaire, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes never had a chance to speak with these men or even know of their existence—and here, at last, we begin to appreciate the enormity of the calamity, for the distintegration of native America was a loss not just to those societies but to the human enterprise as a whole.

Cultures are like books, the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss once remarked, each a volume in the great library of humankind. In the sixteenth century, more books were burned than ever before or since. How many Homers vanished? How many Hesiods? What great works of painting, sculpture, architecture, and music vanished or never were created? Languages, prayers, dreams, habits, and hopes—all gone.

Maize had an equivalent impact on much of the rest of the world after Columbus introduced it to Europe. Central Europeans became especially hooked on it; by the nineteenth century, maize was the daily bread of Serbia, Rumania, and Moldavia. So

Scholars had known for more than fifteen hundred years that the world was large and round. Colón disputed both facts.

By fall the settlers' situation was secure enough that they held a feast of thanksgiving. Massasoit showed up with ninety people, most of them young men with weapons. The Pilgrim militia responded by marching around and firing their guns in the air in a manner intended to convey menace. Gratified, both sides sat down, ate a lot of food, and complained about the Narragansett. Ecce Thanksgiving.

After all, there are more valid facts and details in works of art than there are in history books.

Why would anyone write a poem in this wrecked world? And really, how could they? Massive doubt, failed love, shitty thoughts, empty spirit, a dead history compelling a transfixed vision, these are devastations that might overwhelm and silence anyone; and silence, for a poet, is a prison. It's where the descent hits bottom, it's where the poet either faces or does not face all the risks of failed comprehension.

And so a character named Red Devil seemed a proxy voice, speaking for everybody, when he would cackle hysterically and yell out, "Manteno, 1963. I'm history!" Manteno was the state mental hospital but nothing beyond that was elaborated. To be history in America doesn't mean to be recorded, noted, added to the narrative, but precisely the opposite, to be gone, banished, left behind. To be history is to be cut from the story.

Not one great country can be named, from the polar regions in the north to New Zealand in the south, in which the aborigines do not tattoo themselves.

At some future period, not very distant as measured by centuries, the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace the savage races throughout the world.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.