Quotes About History

Tell about the South. What's it like there. What do they do there. Why do they live there. Why do they live at all.

no man can cause more grief than the one clinging blindly to the vices of his ancesters.

Marriage is long enough to have plenty of room for time behind it.

All the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottle-neck of the most recent decade of years.

and the very old men--some in their brushed Confederate uniforms--on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years.

It's all now you see. Yesterday won't be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.

in a few thousand years, I who regard you will also have sprung from the loins of African kings.

He got off on Lincoln and slavery and dared any man there to deny that Lincoln and the negro and Moses and the children of Israel were the same, and that the Red Sea was just the blood that had to be spilled in order that the black race might cross into the Promised Land.

Il passato non è morto e sepolto. In realtà non è neppure passato

who two thousand years hence will still be throwing triumphantly off the yoke of Latin culture and intelligence of which they were never in any great permanent danger to begin with.

The past isn't dead. It isn't even past. --Wm. Faulkner

The past is never dead. It's not even past; it's always part of the present.

There now. Just look at what your grandpa did to that poor old nigger." "Yes," I said. "Now he can spend day after day marching in parades. If it hadn't been for my grandfather, he'd have to work like whitefolks.

Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.

Only yesterday was a wilderness ordinary

old General Compson had gone to his fathers at last—or to whatever bivouac old soldiers of that war, blue or gray either, probably insisted on going to since probably no place would suit them for anything resembling a permanent stay —

You have heard---or anyway you will---people talk about evil times or an evil generation. There are no such things. No epoch of history nor generation of human beings either ever was or is or will be big enough to hold the unvirtue of any given moment, anymore than they could contain all the air of any given moment; all they can do is hope to be as little soiled as possible during their passage through it.

Wasn't it just one before?' the old porter said. 'Wasn't one enough then to tell us the same thing all them two thousand years ago:

The past is not dead. In fact, it's not even past.

where would Christianity be today if Jesus had been given ten to twenty with time off for good behavior

You can always see an ancient city better when it's been bombed.

Time moves in one direction, memory in another.

Eras are conveniences, particularly for those who never experienced them. We carve history from totalities beyond our grasp. Bolt labels on the result. Handles. Then speak of the handles as though they were things in themselves.

Cliches became cliches for a reason; that they usually hold at least a modicum of truth, and the following cliche is truer than most: You can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been.