Quotes About History

Was John Brown simply an episode, or was he an eternal truth? And if a truth, how speaks that truth today?

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

You had better—all you people of the South— prepare yourselves for a settlement of this question. It must come up for settlement sooner than you are prepared for it, and the sooner you commence that preparation, the better for you. You may dispose of me very easily—I am nearly disposed of now; but this question is still to be settled— this Negro question, I mean. The end of that is not yet.

Through history, the powers of single black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.

All things in this world are historical.

I alight at Esplanade in a smell of roasting coffee and creosote and walk up Royal Street. The lower Quarter is the best part. The ironwork on the balconies sags like rotten lace. Little French cottages hide behind high walls. Through deep sweating carriageways one catches glimpses of courtyards gone to jungle.

Last summer I picked up a yellow scrap of newspaper and read of a Biloxi election in 1948, and in it I caught the smell of history more pungently than from the metal marker telling of the French and Spanish two hundred years ago and the Yankees one hundred years ago. 1948. What a faroff time.

I prefer to live in the South but on my own terms. It takes some doing to insert oneself in such a way as not to succumb to the ghosts of the Old South or the happy hustlers of the new Sunbelt South.

It is hardly surprising, then, that the evangel, the Gospel report of a single historical event—even though this event may be read by Christians as the single most important occurrence, the very watershed, of all history—should be seen by a certain set of the academic mind as exemplary; that is, as an instance of such-and-such recurring human proclivity for attributing divine manifestations to particular historical events.

The World is a very old place, so you'll never be able to tell a completely original story

Our ancestors move along with us, in underground rivers and springs too deep for chaos to reach.

It reminded me that they [the students] were more than just their scholarly shortcomings and gripes about the workload. Each had a history, a set of problems. Each, for better or worse, was anchored to a family.

It is important for children to learn that they are the sum of those who have come before them.

I covered his thumbprint with my thumb and considered for the first time that Papa might have been more than just old pictures - old, repeated stories.

The real war will never get in the books.

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.

not one escaped to tell the fall of Alamo, The hundred & fifty are dumb yet at Alamo.

America doesn't know today how proud she ought to be of her Ingersoll .

The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem. In the history of the earth hitherto the largest and most stirring appear tame and orderly to their ampler largeness and stir. Here at last is something in the doings of man that corresponds with the broadcast doings of the day and night. Here is not merely a nation, but a teeming nation of nations. Here is action untied from strings, necessarily blind to particulars and details, magnificently moving in vast masses.

Chanter of Personality, outlining what is yet to be, I project the history of the future.

THIS DUST WAS ONCE THE MAN. This dust was once the man, Gentle, plain, just and resolute, under whose cautious hand, Against the foulest crime in history known in any land or age, Was saved the Union of these States.

Washington, Franklin, Madison, Hamilton, Adams, and Jefferson had imagined the American experiment coming to all sorts of bad ends. They never imagined the Federal City overrun by frontiersmen who cared nothing for history and loved only cheap land and credit, whiskey, tobacco, guns, fast women, fast horses, and Jesus. Not necessarily in that order.

The creation of the United States of America is the central event of the past four hundred years.

America's civilization perturbs the trajectories of all other civilizations just by existing.