Quotes About History

If you go back to early folk, it's all storytelling; that's exactly what it is: some guy telling a story in a pub to 50 people with a guitar, you know.

It's going to take generations of gay people marrying before these things start to feel natural. We haven't had it long enough to remake it as our own, so it does feel like you're getting dressed up in straight drag to do it.

Gay actors have been playing straight since Euripides.

It is of course the nature of historical contraction that the shortest distance to a historical destination is never a straight line.

People take the longest possible paths, digress to numerous dead ends, and make all kinds of mistakes. Then historians come along and write summaries of this messy, nonlinear process and make it appear like a simple, straight line.

What history taught me is that societies are not static and that the straight line of progressive ideals - this thinking we have that a society will just magically become more egalitarian over time - is patently false.

What is New York? A straightforward answer: seven million people crushed onto an island originally settled by the Dutch. But it's more than that. These are seven million who were, mainly, not even born here.

Two hundred years ago, bathrooms didn't exist. The bathroom's development has not been a straightforward matter, and you might be surprised to learn that many Tudor people had worse personal hygiene than their medieval ancestors.

Christianity emerged from the religion of Israel. Or rather, it has as its background a persistent strain in that religion. To that strain Christians have looked back, and rightly, as the preparation in history for their faith.

The divorce rate in 1946 was higher than it ever had been and as high as it ever would be until the '70s. The reason was that prior relationships had not endured the strain of war.

I read daft history books. Sometimes the books I read are a bit crackers or strange.

There is something inexpressibly sad in the thought of the children who crossed the ocean with the Pilgrims and the fathers of Jamestown, New Amsterdam, and Boston, and the infancy of those born in the first years of colonial life in this strange new world.

My first encounter with Marx's writings came very early in life, as a result of the strange times I grew up in, with Greece exiting the nightmare of the neofascist dictatorship of 1967-74.

Economic libertarians and Christian evangelicals, united by their common enemy, are strange bedfellows in today's Republican party, just as the two Georges - the archconservative Wallace and the uberliberal McGovern - found themselves in the same Democratic Party in 1972.

It was so strange. I knew that Josephine Baker had performed on the same stage but that night I felt it. Many of the same people who worked with Josephine Baker are still here. They know what they're doing. And that was a very comfortable feeling.

With Germany herself falling, it is not strange that the nations leagued with her also went down to defeat.

If you're not interested in history, if you're living for the day, you need some sort of cliche hook. I certainly don't think of myself as a cult anything. It's a strange thing to even consider pursuing.

My mother arrived in Brussels in 1938 from a small town near Krakow. But strangely enough, in 1942 or 1943, she was taken back to Auschwitz, which was just 30 miles from where she grew up. Her parents died there and a lot of her family.

I was no stranger to racism. Having grown up a black person in the '60s and '70s, I knew that prejudice was common.

Historically, science-fiction and fantasy literature is no stranger to controversy, but it has learned how to adapt and endure.

I'm not a stranger to the persecution that Muslims have faced over the years.

To the general public in America, the lifespan of Deep Purple probably finished with our 1984 album, 'Perfect Strangers.'

When it's all over I might be able to say I've had the strangest career in pro football history.

Here's the thing with the costumes for 'Mommy': Given the background and social strata that the characters come from, you can't really imagine that they've gone shopping lately, so we went for that very normcore, fashionless era in history, the early 2000s, which was completely transitional.