Quotes About History

Por que en las epocas oscuras se escribe con tinta invisible? Why in the darkest ages do they write with invisible ink?

He vivido tanto que un día tendrán que olvidarme por fuerza.

Nació un hombre entre muchos que nacieron, viví entre muchos hombres que vivieron, y esto no tiene historia sino tierra.

We have learned nothing in twelve thousand years. (Upon exiting the Lascaux cave, France)

After Altamira, all is decadence - we have invented nothing

En carta del 9 de septiembre de 1817 a su londinense iniciador masónico, lord MacDuff, escribe San Martín, acongojado: "¡Qué sentimiento de dolor, mi querido amigo, debe despertar en vuestro pecho el destino de estas bellas regiones! Parecería que los españoles estuvieran empecinados en convertirlas en un desierto, tal es el carácter de la guerra que hacen. Ni edades ni sexos escapan al patíbulo".

the new world may be in fact a very, very, very, very old world.

Sir P. C. Roy's History of Hindu Chemistry, in B. N. Seal's Positive Sciences of the Ancient Hindus, in B. K. Sarkar's Hindu Achievements in Exact Science and his The Positive Background of Hindu Sociology, and in U. C. Dutt's Materia Medica of the Hindus. 2

If we are to make progress, we must not repeat history but make new history. We must add to the inheritance left by our ancestors. If we may make new discoveries and inventions in the phenomenal world, must we declare our bankruptcy in the spiritual domain? Is

A hundred years from now they'll still be ploughing up skulls. And I seemed to be in that time and looking back. I think I saw our ghosts.

The past is a palimpsest. Early memories are always obscured by accumulations of later knowledge.

you should go tho the past, looking not for messages or warnings, but simply to be humbled by the weight of human experience that has preceded the brief flicker of your own few days.

She had so mastered the strategies of camouflage that her own history had seemed a series of well-placed mirrors that kept her hidden from herself.

In Charleston, more than elsewhere, you get the feeling that the twentieth century is a vast, unconscionable mistake.

There are no verdicts to childhood, only consequences, and the bright freight of memory. I speak now of the sun-struck, deeply lived-in days of my past. I am more fabulist than historian, but I will try to give you the insoluble, unedited terror of youth. I betray the integrity of my family's history by turning everything, even sadness, into romance. There is no romance in this story; there is only the story.

My memory often seems like a city of exiled poets afire with the astonishment of language, each believing in the integrity of his own witness, each with a separate version of culture and history, and the divine essential fire that is poetry itself.

Humor has always been the redemptive angel in the Conroys's sad history. With this family, I shall never grow hungry from lack of material.

It has always been difficult for me to face the truth about my childhood because it requires a commitment to explore the lineaments and features of a history I would prefer to forget. For years I did not have to face the demonology of my youth; I made a simple choice not to and found solace in the gentle palmistry of forgetfulness, a refuge in the cold, lordly glooms of the unconscious. But I was drawn back to the history of my family and the failures of my own adult life

I wish I had no history to report. I've pretended for so long that my childhood did not happen. I had to keep it tight, up near the chest. I could not let it out.

But, until that day, I had no idea I was being raised by one of the goddamnest fighter pilots in the history of the Marine Corps. My father and I looked at each other, and I believe we both realized we had just completed our first great day as father and son.

let them feel the hurt and sorrow of history.

The South's got a lot wrong with it. But it's permanent press and it doesn't wash out.

could not hold them accountable or indict them for crimes they could not help. They, too, had a history—one that I remembered with both tenderness and pain, one that made me forgive their transgressions against their own children. In families there are no crimes beyond forgiveness.

The imprint of Dachau branded me indelibly and caused me to suffer the miscarriage of my hopeful philosophy. If man was good, then Dachau could never have happened. Simple as that.