Quotes About History

A country without a memory is a country of madmen.

My challenge was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly.

The history of the human race is the history of ordinary people who have overcome their fears and accomplished extraordinary things.

Imagination plays too important a role in the writing of history, and what is imagination but the projection of the author's personality.

Nothing capable of being memorized is history.

Someone once said "Don't try to be a great man. Just be a man, and let history make its own judgements."

One of the lessons of history is that even the deepest crises can be moments of opportunity. They bring ideas from the margins into the mainstream.

Who doesn't know that the first law of history is not to dare to say anything false, and the second is not to refrain from saying anything true?

The Olympics have been with the world since 776 B.C., and have only been interrupted by war, especially in the modern era.

The past was "built", the present is "assembled" & the future - "programmed"!

We leave it up to books and movies to talk about WWII on our behalf.

What's interesting is that when you get into the post-war period, many of the narratives in books and movies conclude that if you killed Hitler, you're actually going to make history worse.

History is the collective consciousness of the then intellectuals and not just some numbers, time and events.

We go forward with our heads held high, but look back and remember where we come from.

The great courageous act that we must all do, is to have the courage to step out of our history and past so that we can live our dreams.

What's past is prologue, and the world awaits.

Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.

Music can be healing, and with my history and my knowledge of both sides of what looks like a gigantic divide in the world, I feel I can point a way forward to our common humanity again.

The blues will always be because the blues are the roots of all American music.

I never taught people where to step on '2', because when I learned how to dance there was no '2'. We just danced to the music.

I think popular music in this country is one of the few things in the twentieth century that have made giant strides in reverse.

I write music, it's performed. After all, my music says it all. It doesn't need historical and hysterical commentaries. In the long run, any words about music are less important than the music.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.

Believe me when I say that some of the most amazing music in history was made on equipment that's not as good as what you own right now.