Quotes About History

The generations of lives, experiences, and voices of marginalized and silenced Americans offer an array of diverse interpretations of U.S. history that have largely gone unheard, unacknowledged, and unrewarded. Without their perspectives, we are presented with an incomplete and incongruent story that is at best a disservice to the historical record and at worst a means of maintaining an unjust status quo.

America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.

More than one in four U.S. presidents were involved in human trafficking and slavery.

The world had reclaimed its own reality, and, just like after a catastrophe, my culture had ended: I was merely a historical fact. Everything in me had been reclaimed by the beginning of time and by my own beginning. I had passed on to a first, primary plane, I was in the silence of the winds and in the age of tin and copper - at the first age of life.

Tudo no mundo começou com um sim. Uma molécula disse sim a outra molécula e nasceu a vida. Mas antes da pré-história havia a pré-história da pré-história e havia o nunca e havia o sim. Sempre houve. Não sei o quê, mas sei o que o universo jamais começou.

Mas talvez seja assim mesmo: todo homem tem que um dia descobrir a pólvora. Ou então não houve experiência. E seu fracasso? como se conciliar com o próprio fracasso? Bem, toda história de uma pessoa é a história de seu fracasso. Através do qual... Ele, aliás, não falhara totalmente.

Vengo de lejos, de una fuerte ancestralidad. Yo, que vengo del dolor de vivir. Y ya no lo quiero.

Incidentally, although the Cistercians did much to improve the quality of sheep, the animal remained much smaller than its modern descendants; as late as the early eighteenth century a sheep wasn't much bulkier than a Labrador Dog.

By the middle of Henry VIII's reign, the white meats — that is, dairy products — were considered common fare and people from all classes would eat meat whenever they could get it.

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evalua­ tion of the interrelationships among the components of the present- day society.

So I can understand the mad passion for travel books and their deceptiveness. They create the illusion of something which no longer exists but still should exist, if we were to have any hope of avoiding the overwhelming conclusion that the history of the past twenty thousand years is irrevocable.

Enthusiastic partisans of the idea of progress are in danger of failing to recognize... the immense riches accumulated by the human race. By underrating the achievements of the past, they devalue all those which still remain to be accomplished.

The Europeans fight to exterminate us and call it civilizing us.

There is nothing glorious about what our ancestors call history. It is simply a succession of mistakes, intolerances and violations.

La forma en que nombramos plantas, flores, frutos, aun usando un mismo idioma, devela nuestro origen tanto o más que cualquier tonada. De allí somos, de donde florece o da fruto cada palabra.

The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow.

Hey you — All our fevered history won't instill insight, won't turn a body conscious, won't make that look in the eyes say yes, though there is nothing to solve even as each moment is an answer.

What does a victorious or defeated black woman's body in a historically white space look like?

this nation is both its credits and debits.

You like to think memory goes far back though remembering was never recommended. Forget all that, the world says. The world's had a lot of practice.

History's authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued effects.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard

Enter the title) "...It takes a personal question (or moment of doubt could be another way of thinking about it) and interrogates lines of inquiry surrounding that question, historically and psychologically. After a while the answer is known but it no longer matters because the expanding life of the question is what keeps us reading. This is the kind of book that demands I slow down the closer I get to its end, preparing myself for the loss of the speaker in my world.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really just say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?