Quotes About History

In Old Havana, the names of the streets before the revolution provided a glimpse into the city's state of mind. You might have known someone who lived on the corner of Soul and Bitterness, Solitude and Hope, or Light and Avocado.

Harlem's streets lead backward, into history, straight to a work such as 'This Was Harlem.'

The murder of John Kennedy in broad daylight in the streets of an American city remains, to me, an unsolved crime.

In Alexandria, my birthplace and my home, all streets bearing Jewish names have been renamed.

Every European goes on the streets and sees medieval churches. Not if you live in Indianapolis.

Jazz came out of New Orleans, and that was the forerunner of everything. You mix jazz with European rhythms, and that's rock n' roll, really. You can make the argument that it all started on the streets of New Orleans with the jazz funerals.

I grew up in Skaneateles, a small town in New York's Finger Lakes region, where parts of my family have lived for five generations. I can walk the streets there and point out my father's childhood home, the houses my grandfather built, the farm where my great-great-uncle worked after he emigrated from England in the 1880s.

What would we do without plaques to tell us who lived where and when? They introduce the past into the present, and are the quickest and most interesting way of reminding us that our streets exist above and beyond the here-and-now.

I met a Shanghai photographer who finds these old streets and matches the French names to what they are today. I was able to find my grandfather's block, and just walking the same streets and finding his house was deeply moving. I finally felt connected to China.

The map we made of the 3,000-year-old city of Tanis requires no imagination. It has buildings, streets, admin complexes, houses - clear as day.

Many times, I'd spend the night walking the city streets: the Trevi fountain, in the dark, is so beautiful it moves you, but the Colosseum is my favourite place - you can breathe history there.

I love the streets of Kolkata, and I admire the old architectural buildings.

Bath was dusty and a little shabby when we moved here. It did look its age and you felt its history in its streets and buildings and little alleyways. The sense of the past was palpable. There were some bad modern buildings but there was a patina of age.

As a U.S. History major, there is something very cool about being in cities, and walking the streets of Philadelphia or Boston or New York and seeing historical sites.

History suggests that the disillusioned and the disaffected do not readily take to the streets nor man the barricades to defend a system that failed to defend them.

Most people give Kennedy a passing grade, a good grade on the Cuban Missile Crisis handling, but what they don't realize, if he had had strength, if he had showed strength before, there would never have been a Cuban Missile Crisis.

Posttraumatic stress is something that's always existed. I think that the earliest recording was during the Trojan War, but it's only recently that we're beginning to be aware of it.

Writing about Jerusalem was very stressful; every word counts.

When I was making 'Strong Island,' it was very clear to me that my brother's death was a point on a line that stretched back into the 1940s and beyond in my family - and in the nation.

Pleas for white acceptance of black humanity have a long and terrible history in America, stretching back to the first slave narratives.

The word 'America' probably didn't appear in the Persian language until the end of the 18th century - but then with a documented past stretching back at least 5,000 years, the east had riches of its own.

History creates comprehensibility primarily by arranging facts meaningfully and only in a very limited sense by establishing strict causal connections.

I do remember doing shows strictly in black and white, too, so you're right.

'Confederate,' in all of our minds, will be an alternative-history show. It's a science-fiction show. One of the strengths of science fiction is that it can show us how this history is still with us in a way no strictly realistic drama ever could, whether it were a historical drama or a contemporary drama.