Quotes About History

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

Where they burn books, at the end they also burn people

The stones here speak to me, and I know their mute language. Also, they seem deeply to feel what I think. So a broken column of the old Roman times, an old tower of Lombardy, a weather-beaten Gothic piece of a pillar understands me well. But I am a ruin myself, wandering among ruins.

The Romans would never have found time to conquer the world if they had been obliged first to learn Latin.

I have gazed on the face of Agamemnon.

The historian reports to us, not events themselves, but the impressions they have made on him.

From 1994 introduction by Dr. Klaus Müller.] The postwar German government did not simply forget about homosexuals; on the contrary, it actively continued to persecute them, and to justify the efforts of the Nazis in this respect… The Nazi version of Paragraph 175 was, in fact, explicitly upheld in 1957 by the West German supreme court.

Probablemente el supuesto buen gusto preponderante en la sociedad actual prohíbe hablar del exterminio de los presos en los campos de concentración, particularmente cuando se trata de homosexuales.

Hitler's ability to keep a secret was unparalleled.

twenty pfennigs per pound. Hitler

Whether we like it or not, Linge's Hitler comes across as a rounded human being, and he is arguably all the more terrifying for that. Linge

Thirty-seven years later I found out for whom he had been searching: Charlotte Lobjoie, a woman who had born him a son, Jean Marie, in March 1918.40

Amid the chaos and confusion, one thing alone was certain: for the first time, a woman would sit upon the throne of England.

For the first time in the kingdom's history, all the contenders for the crown that Edward was about to relinquish were female.

It was to kings, not queens, that Tudor sovereigns looked for example and warning. ("I am Richard II, know ye not that?" Elizabeth sharply remarked in response to Shakespeare's meditation on the nature of kingship.)

What had been right in 1431 in English Rouen – to secure the girl's salvation by persuading her to abjure her heresy and embrace the loving counsel of the Church – was wrong twenty-five years later, in a kingdom from which God had driven the English with their tails between their legs.

If we could know as intimately as we know our more immediate parents the long line of ancestors through whom the family spirit has passed on its way to us, we should probably become fatalists in face of the apparently overwhelming evidence that there is nothing in us that has not come to us from, or at least through, the Family. Family portrait galleries are a striking confirmation of the persistence of characteristics which ultimately govern the fortunes of successive generations.

We are living through such times that those yet born will look back in wonder

Only a very few people leave traces in history, or even bequeath family documents to their descendants. Most have no money to memorialise themselves, and lack even a gravestone to mark their existence. Women's lives, in particular, remain largely unrecorded. But even so, did they not shape the future?

History is a card table full of illusions, and we must sort through and pick the ones we wish to believe.

History tumbled from every street corner and stuck to her heels as she walked down the sidewalk.

those who had been obliged to be silent for nearly forty years were once again being told that there could be no public recognition of their past lives or memories.

the past that has not passed away

the European concentration camp universe was already in existence.