Quotes About History

defense of states and rights is impossible to undertake if no one learns from the past or believes in the future.

Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history.

No accumulation of good, no matter how vast, undoes an evil; no rescue of the future, no matter how successful, undoes a murder in the past.

Yet it can be recorded, and it can be understood. Indeed, it must be understood so that its like can be prevented in the future. That must be enough for us and for those who, let us hope, shall follow.

no stereotype can explain why and how, in the six months after the German invasion of the Soviet Union, a technique to kill Jews in large numbers was developed and some one million Jews were murdered.

The racist and colonial idea that the Holocaust began as an elemental explosion of primitive antisemitism arose as Nazi propaganda and apologetics.

the Nazis first and the Soviets later made efforts to direct responsibility for the killing of the Jews to the countries they both invaded. Certainly

This unprecedented mass murder would have been impossible without a special kind of politics. —

The world is now changing, reviving fears that were familiar in Hitler's time, and to which Hitler responded. The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

The ashes of Warsaw were still warm when the Cold War began.

The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.

The Commonwealth attained its greatest glory when its Polish and Lithuanian knights and its Ukrainian Cossacks fought side by side.

The last Lithuanian grand duke who even knew the Lithuanian language died the year Columbus discovered America.

A] history of disintegration can be a guide to repair. Erosion reveals what resists, what can be reinforced, what can be reconstructed, and what must be reconceived.

Double collaboration was noticed by Jews and Poles in these places, but is absent in both Ukrainian and German histories of the war. —

In hotel rooms, I watched Russian television toy with the traumatic American history of race, suggesting that Barack Obama had been born in Africa. It struck me as odd that the American entertainer Donald Trump picked up the theme not long thereafter.

When history is removed, numbers go upward and memories go inward, to all of our peril.

Still, even when false, legends can be most informative.

The Roman Empire, born out the Roman Republic, with its ideas of democracy among a certain group of wealthy men (no vote for men without land -as with our Founding Fathers- and certainly no vote for women and slaves. Why are democracies built on top of one form of slavery or another?)

The fundamental insight of SRT is, simply put, that human labor is at the heart of creating or reproducing society as a whole. The notion of labor is conceived here in the original sense in which Karl Marx meant it, as "the first premise of all human history

What surprises historians of language is that Arabic has been able to preserve a morphology already exemplified by Hammurabi's code in the nineteenth or eighteenth century B.C., and a phonetic system which perpetuates, apart from one single sound, the very rich sound range borne witness to by the most ancient Semitic alphabets discovered.

The history of Africans in America is brutal, but we have made art out of pain, sustaining our spirits with sunbursts of beauty, teaching ourselves how to rise the next day.

wove spiritual beliefs, cultural values, and historical

South Carolina's history, punctuated by the sale of little children, might be read as a cautionary tale about how a self-centered ruling class could rely on racial prejudice in the service of unchecked capitalism and to the detriment of moral character.