Quotes About History

glittering mortuary masks, items harvested from ruins and tombs all over Mexico.

this land has relied on masquerade for millennia

On November 2, 1492, in Cuba, Christopher Columbus saw an Arawak man puffing on rolled tobacco leaves, a European's first glimpse of smoking.

I told him to tell the truth,' Mr. Fang said. 'It is important to know the truth about the Cultural Revolution. Foreigners must be told. We must face the facts. It was a disaster ...

I often had the feeling that it was the old immemorial Confucian family that had kept China orderly. Mao had attacked the family-the Cultural Revolution was intentionally an assault on the family system, when children were told to rat on their bourgeois parents. But that had faltered and failed. The family had endured

All the crockery in China had been smashed – flung over the years in all the periodic convulsions for which China was famous. All the blood-stained carpets had been tossed away. All the ancestors' portraits had been destroyed. All the bodies had been buried. It was a country of bare rooms and empty shelves, like this apartment

I came to see that for him, for most sociopaths, he had no memory—took no responsibility for anything he'd said or done—had no past, no history, it never happened. Memory is essential to conscience; he had no conscience.

shadowy literary history of Othón and you see that his poems were translated into English by Samuel Beckett. It was not his wasteland weariness that appealed to Beckett—though the wasteland predominates—but rather Beckett's need for money.

I went to the Yungang Caves outside Datong, where travelers used to draw chalk circles on the beautiful frescoes and Chinese workmen would hack them off the wall and wrap them up; and where another lively business was the beheading of Buddhas. Even so, there are plenty of Buddhas left-and several in the larger caves are as tall as a three-story building.

But these former Red Guards and the refugees from the Cultural Revolution-surely they're out of school?' 'No, Chen said. 'There's a whole army of night-school students.

A woman in the English Department at Fudan University walked with a cane as a result of criticism by Red Guards-she was kicked and beaten for advocating the reading of the Bourgeois feudalist William Shakespeare. But times had changed. This same woman had just been a faculty adviser on a student production of Much Ado About Nothing at the Shanghai Shakespeare Festival in the spring of 1986.

within walking distance of every historical sight, and it provided a garage where my car would not be stolen or vandalized.

Fiction give life to places in expressive ways that no history book can begin to suggest.

An old Japanese friend recently confided to me: ' I can't forgive to americans for the fact that Hiroshima wasn't an act of war, but an experiment'.

In India, the past refuses to die, undisturbed by new realities.

Everywhere you looked in India there was evidence of a past that had attained mythical heights. From philosophy to architecture, few civilisations have left such an awesome record.

The root of oppression is loss of memory

Indians think it is important to remember, while Americans believe it is important to forget.

I too have lost audience members. Six million have left the theater.

No matter what side you were on, if you had survived Gettysburg you were to be congratulated.

Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.

Ester asked why people are sad. That's simple, says the old man. They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people's ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.

We are afraid of losing what we have, whether it's our life or our possessions and property. But this fear evaporates when we understand that our life stories and the history of the world were written by the same hand.

The future would end up finding out the truth about the past.