Quotes About History

Who destroys books? Cities, churches, dictators and fanatics. Their fingers itch to build a pyre and strike the match. On 10 May 1933, students gathered in Berlin to dance around a bonfire of 25,000 volumes of 'un-German' books. They burned, amongst many others, Bertolt Brecht, Otto Dix, Heinrich Heine, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and H.G. Wells. They destroyed them because the contents were too dangerous.

Perhaps the greatest use of history is that it teaches compassion for both sides and especially compassion for ordinary people caught up in great events.

Between 1799 and 1810 the legislatures of New Jersey, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania passed statutes forbidding the state courts from citing any cases decided by English courts after July 4, 1776.

The Ledbetter episode came and went quickly. It is entirely predictable that other discrete disputes over the intent of Congress and the meaning of federal statutes will similarly come and go in the future. But there exists a more profound constitutionally-based struggle between the Court and Congress over the boundaries of congressional lawmaking authority, with origins deep in the country's history.

This was the inauspicious background for the nomination by John Adams of John Marshall, his secretary of state, to be the nation's fourth chief justice. Marshall, a Virginian and combat veteran of the Revolutionary War, was forty-five years old, until this day the youngest person ever to assume the office

Marbury v. Madison, the Marshall Court's best-known case, and one of the most famous in Supreme Court history, was decided early in the chief justice's tenure, on February 24, 1803. It grew out of the tense and messy transition of power from the Adams Federalists to the Jeffersonian Republicans after the election of 1800.

The decision's significance, of course, lay in the Court's assertion of authority to review the constitutionality of acts of Congress. "It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is," Marshall declared—a line that the Court has invoked throughout its history, down to the present. In the guise of modestly disclaiming authority to act, the Court had assumed for itself great power.

Was Hayburn's Case, then, the first instance of the Supreme Court declaring an act of Congress unconstitutional? Not formally.

The people her own age had not ever recovered from the war. The older people are still in the pain of history. Some say it is over, the A'atsika way. It isn't, Ruth wanted to tell the world that she hangs by her strength. Alone. Don't be fooled. This is just America happening to us again. She would like to keep them from ruining themselves altogether.

We are those who came from the ones who survived, buried in that place after walking the death trail from Mississippi. Missa Sipokna. We walked into this lost foreign place having no homes, no body of peace just the papers with signatures of those who made promises not held.

Dinosaurs have been extremely popular in the last few decades. It's no wonder. They're cool; they're huge; and they're magnificent creatures! But when did they live, and why did they die? Did they live alongside early man? These are good questions to consider. Did you know that modern man didn't even know about dinosaurs

We do a lot of shows for young people who have probably never been to the theater before and they are learning about the Holocaust, which unhappily, many of them do not know about.

The future is only the past Entered again by a different gate. —Sir Arthur Wing Pinero

The works of the Impressionists, as much as those of any medieval craftsman or renaissance Humanist, are related to a world view, a context of interdependent beliefs and ideas about what is good and bad, true and false, the nature of existence and the means for investigating it. There are no 'value vacuums' in human history, no 'intermediary periods', only periods which are more or less unified, more or less amenable to the procedures, and temperaments, of historians.

Meet Madeleine Cahill," he said. "Founder of the Madrigal line.

I always thought it was a shame . . . that we didn't keep those things safe somehow.

We can't, little cricket. It is against the law to fly this flag - even to put up a picture of it. Korea is part of the Japanese Empire now. But someday this will be our own country once more. Your own country.

Men recorded their experiences and called it history; men looked about the world and called their observations science; men wondered about the existence of God and the problem of evil and called their speculations theology; men did handiwork and called it art; men made up stories, wrote them down and called them literature; men thought about such topics as truth, beauty, justice, and the nature of existence and called their opinions philosophy.

There are numerous oral stories which tell of what it means, what it feels like, to be present while your history is erased before your eyes, dismissed as irrelevant, ignored or rendered as the lunatic ravings of drunken old people

research', is probably one of the dirtiest words in the Indigenous world's vocabulary

The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world's colonized peoples

The genesis of some of this thinking might have been the words of Thomas Jefferson in his influential and widely circulated 1785 book Notes on the State of Virginia. Though he was not a doctor or scientist, Jefferson cataloged the physiological ways Black bodies differed from white bodies in this 244-page document.

We've survived the Black Plague, the Titanic, and Pearl Harbor just to name a few. Not to mention the Disco Period.

What the German has done to the Jew in Europe, we are doing to the Jap in the Pacific.