Quotes About History

Collecting is more than just buying objects.

Here in Barcelona, it's the architects who built the buildings that made the city iconic who are the objects of admiration - not a bunch of half-witted monarchs.

If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humans themselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with.

I don't only collect Nazi stuff; I collect objects from all the Axis countries.

The obligation to remember is inscribed on every Holocaust memorial, but even the words 'Never Forget' become irksome eventually.

One thing I like about historical fiction is that I'm not constantly focusing on me, or people like me; you're obliged to concentrate on lives that are completely other than your own.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

We are born, we live, we disappear. One of the chilling aspects of history is the swiftness with which it carries us into oblivion.

I just lucked into this weird, little obscure cameoesque film career. I just love being a part of film history.

I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.

Of the Sturges family, much more is known than is available about poor Irish immigrants and obscure Scottish-English settlers around Rochester.

Sometimes people get fairly obscure just for the creative license of it, and that can backfire. Iconic stories are iconic for a reason, and there are so many incredible, iconic history stories that have not been told that we don't need to go too deep in the well yet.

I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.

From now back to the past, we can observe clearly that none of us is free.

It is not possible to completely eliminate mediation between you as an observer and the history you are trying to understand.

The historian is, by definition, absolutely incapable of observing the facts which he examines.

I'm really obsessed with the past.

I'm obsessed with historical English royalty.

I am obsessed with cinema and its history.

I am not sure why, but I have been obsessed by the Atom Bomb ever since it first happened.

When I became obsessed with Winston Churchill, I wrote a book about Churchill. What a joy it was to write that book!

I'm sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called 'The Huey P. Newton Story,' and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.

I was shocked that I knew so little about Alan Turing. Then I started to read about him, and I got a little obsessed.

'Pompeii' is kind of a lifelong obsession for me.