Quotes About History

Walter J. Boyne

Human society first formed itself with the aid of oral speech, becoming literate very late in its history, and at first only in certain groups. Homo sapiens has been in existence for between 30,000 and 50,000 years. The earliest script dates from only 6000 years ago.

Homeric Greece and everything that philosophy after Plato stood for was, however superficially cordial and continuous, in fact deeply antagonistic, if often at the unconscious rather than the conscious level.

It is a rash man indeed who would set himself up as final arbiter on all that happened the incredible night the Titanic went down.

In the case of the living, the Register carefully ran the phrase, 'Arrived Titan-Carpath , April 18, 1912.' The hyphen represented history's greatest sea disaster.

That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.

Freedom for us has always been dangerous. Freedom for us has been a crime as far back as our oldest memories. And so whenever we're feeling liberation we know that there's somebody nearby with a rope and a collar, a shotgun and a curse.

The person who controls history controls their fate. The man who can tell you what happened, or did not happen, is lord and master of all he surveys.

It was mid-November 2008. There were pirates taking ships with impunity in African waters, terrorists punching holes in Indian security, China sinking towards depression because Americans were afraid to buy cheap goods for Christmas, and the richest nation in the history of the world was talking about how to keep a budget.

The girl was cinnamon colored in the way of Native America after it had been raped by Europe.

I was an American citizen too; a citizen who had to watch his step, a citizen who had to distrust the police and the government, public opinion, and even the history taught in schools. It was odd that such negative thoughts would invigorate me. But knowing the truth, no matter how bad it was, gave you some chance, a little bit of an edge.

But all of those things were possible back then even though nobody

You know, the undersized genius had said, ain't no way in the world that black folks could'a done enough bad to call all them centuries'a pain down on our heads.

The word hear will gain a new significance, while write will fall into disuse. And really, what will writing become when no one can read? And what will the future generations think of writing? Like we think of hieroglyphics, no doubt.

The question is,' John added, 'if a person inside a culture has no knowledge of his place in the unfolding of that culture, or in the history of any other people, and if no one else among either the oppressors or the oppressed has that knowledge, can that person be said to be alive? Indeed on what plane could he possibly exist except as chattel where he is a slave or not?

You don't have to be smart to be tough-minded. As a matter of fact, the combination of stupidity and silence might be the greatest weapon in the history of our species.

Most Americans wouldn't understand why two well-dressed men would have to explain why they were standing on a public street. But most Americans cannot comprehend the scrutiny that black people have been under since the days we were dragged here in bondage.

General Douglas MacArthur was the most brilliant, most important, and most valuable military leader in American history—at least that's what Douglas MacArthur thought. When

As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, "the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left."20

Nothing could ever replace the treasure of America's men and women killed or forever maimed by Japan's attack, but Nimitz looked around Pearl Harbor and decided that it could have been much worse. On the list of physical casualties, there were three glaring omissions that would prove to be major strategic blunders on the part of the Japanese.

In reconstructing African civilisations, the concern is to indicate that African social life had meaning and value, and that the African past is one with which the black man in the Americas can identify with pride.

This is typical, trying to treat history as though it is the property of the ruling class, which will dispense however much of it they want to dispense at any given point in time.

Thereby, a new set of social relations—that of landlord and serf—replaced the old relations of slavemaster and slave.

Black people must now take the offensive - if it is anyone who should suffer embarrassment, it is the whites. Did black people roast six million Jews? Who exterminated millions of indigenous inhabitants in the Americas and Australia? Who enslaved countless millions of Africans? The white capitalist cannibal has always fed on the world's black peoples. White capitalist imperialist society is profoundly and unmistakably racist.