Quotes About History

More than that, in the five hundred years of European OCCUPATION, Native cultures have already driven themselves to be remarkably tenacious and resilient.

A hundred years? In political terms, that's when dinosaurs ruled the planet.

Most of us think that history is the past. It's not. History is the stories we tell about the past. That's all it is. Stories. Such a definition might make the enterprise of history seem neutral. Benign.

the [Hawthorn] report revealed the logical fallacy that has haunted Indian history and policy in North America since contact - to wit, that all people yearn for the individual freedom to pursue economic goals. Indians are people, ergo, they want to make money and create wealth for themselves and their families.

The truth about stories is, that's all we are.

While the hardware of civilization - iron pots, blankets, guns - was welcomed by Native people, the software of Protestantism and Catholicism - original sin, universal damnation, atonement, and subligation - was not, and Europeans were perplexed, offended, and incensed that Native peoples had the temerity to take their goods and return their gods.

The truth about stories is that that's all we are.

History may well be a series of stories we tell about the past, but the stories are not just any stories. They're not chosen by chance. By and large, the stories are about famous men and celebrated events. We throw in a couple of exceptional women every now and then, not out of any need to recognize female eminence, but out of embarrassment.

A great many people in North America believe that Canada and the United States, in a moment of inexplicable generosity, gave treaty rights to Native people as a gift. Of course, anyone familiar with the history of Indians in North America knows that Native people paid for every treaty right, and in some cases, paid more than once. The idea that either country gave First Nations something for free is horseshit.

writing a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows.

It's not right to say that our loss in Vietnam turned out to be a gain. But lessons were learned. And they were the right lessons.

As Vulcan's troublesome history reveals, no one gives up on a powerful, or a beautiful, or perhaps simply a familiar and useful conception of the world without utter compulsion – and a real alternative.

As late as 1742, London hatters beat to death a man who dared shape headgear without having gone through the apprentice system.

Madness, mayhem, erotic vandalism, devastation of innumerable souls - while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.

For many feverish years he was burdened with the sensation, an ancient one to be sure, that the incredible sprawl of human history was no more than a pathetically partial record of an infinitely vast and shadowed chronicle of universal metamorphoses. How much greater, then, was the feeling that his own pathetic history formed a practically invisible fragment of what itself was merely an obscure splinter of the infinite. Somehow he needed to liberate himself from the dungeon cell of his life.

Every milestone in the history of the company, even when forecast with heaps of hoopla, was ultimately played out according to some secret timeline of geologic tedium, so that it was drained of all interest and drama well before it took place and afterward went all but unnoticed.

Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page.

The voice of madness, for instance, is barely a whisper in the babbling history of art because its realities are themselves too maddening to speak of for very long — and those of the Teatro have no voice at all, given their imponderably grotesque nature.

Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and whatever else that—with a smattering of emotive images and strains of maudlin music—can move the average citizen to tears or violence, the pessimist is invisible in both history books and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, he could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause. Pessimists are indeed lackadaisical as partisans in the human drama.

Immune to the blandishments of religions, countries, families, and everything else that puts both average and above-average citizens in the limelight, pessimists are sideliners in both history and the media. Without belief in gods or ghosts, unmotivated by a comprehensive delusion, they could never plant a bomb, plan a revolution, or shed blood for a cause.

Madness, chaos, bone-deep mayhem, devastation of innumerable souls—while we scream and perish, History licks a finger and turns the page. Fiction, unable to compete with the world for vividness of pain and lasting effects of fear, compensates in its own way.

But poetry is a way of language, it is not its subject or its maker's background or interests or hobbies or fixations. It is nearer to utterance than history.

The fascination of Germany in this century is the fascination of the abomination. You go there to catch a whiff of the smoke that still hangs in the air.

In 1787, Benjamin Franklin was supposedly asked what would emerge from the Constitutional Convention being held in Philadelphia. "A republic," Franklin answered, "if you can keep it." Today, the bigger challenge is to find anyone who knows what a republic actually is.