Quotes About History

A friend argues that Americans battle between the "historical self" and the "self self." By this she means you mostly interact as friends with mutual interest and, for the most part, compatible personalities; however, sometimes your historical selves, her white self and your black self, or your white self and her black self, arrive with the full force of your American positioning.

By landscape we also mean memory...

The police they believe the police believe the president the history the education the media what entertainment taught them the world they know the worst they carry. That's how we know this is not a mental health issue. This is not an isolated issue. This is not deserving of or serving us.

Just us, just people, the same people, but what is it that the just people are feeling or wanting or being? The brouhaha so brutal, rising, rising up, rise up. What rises up within, between us? What comes up because we are the history within us?

Ricordando la disfatta bulgara, evento decisivo per l'esito della 1° guerra mondiale e dunque per la fine di una civiltà, il conte Károlyi scrive che, mentre lo aveva vissuto, non aveva percepito la sua importanza, perché "in quel momento, non era ancora diventato ." P.42

istoria este un abator si in orice excursie turistica sau calatorie instructiva in locurile bogate in istorie intra grosolana si cruda vulgaritate a celor care se bucura se suferinta altora ca de un spectacol.

Today, questioning oneself about Europe means asking oneself how one relates to Germany.

in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, the indigenous land base shrank by 600,000 square miles, an area roughly the size of Alaska.10

It's not quite as valuable as if it had been written in 1929, when Martin Luther King was born.

The conditions that created the modern American public library are still relevant to any discussion about contemporary and future issues facing those who care about libraries, specifically trustees. To serve as a trustee of a public library places a citizen on an even higher ground shaped by the better part of modern American history. To be a trustee of a public library places one very close to major transformations in American life and culture.

As I write this entry, I touch a saber-tooth tiger skull in my office. Without stars there could be no skulls

Preservations are working to save neon signs for future generations, either on-site or in museums. After all, what would America be without a few giant doughnuts around.

The quipu is significant because it dispels the notion that mathematics flourishes only after a civilization has developed writing; however, societies can reach advanced states without ever having developed written records.

It's just a bow and arrow, but it's not a laughing matter. It might have been at one time, but history takes the laugh out of many things. If the arrow is a joke, so is the atom bomb, so is the sweep of disease laden dust that wipes out whole cities, so is the screaming rocket that arcs and falls then thousand miles away and kills a million people.

For Russia, the early 1900s and the 1990s represent more than just the century's bookends. They also are twin periods of transition in Russian history. Both decades were marked by defeat in war, imperial and economic collapse, and attempts at dramatic reform. Both were infused with nostalgia for a past.

Gender consciousness has become involved in almost every intellectual field: history, literature, science, anthropology. There's been an extraordinary advance.

The astronomer's rule of thumb: if you didn't write it down, it didn't happen

Traditions have got a lot to answer for. They lose their meaning and we cling on to something that does more harm than good.

Wars are remembered when those who were there would rather forget.

The only thing the English have left is their past.

The present time is the best time for reminiscing the pasts.

A biography is like a mini-series with different twists and turns, ups and downs. Others will rewrite it for you when you forget to sign on the last page.

The familial narratives that are so important to who we are and to how the past is handed from one generation to the next disappeared, including those that remained untold until now. I forgot because so much was being forgotten.

Cheese — milk's leap toward immortality.