Quotes About History

The past is open to all sorts of magical possibilities because it can't be verified. It's as we make it, so it seems to be entirely free. It seems to be completely up for grabs. But of course it's not.

Well, I think we still have to verify whatever declaration we will get and make sure that it is comprehensive and accurate. So, that would take care of the past activities.

Vermont's history, at its roots, is multicultural from the members of Ethan Allen's Green Mountain Boys with African heritage to the state's constitution, which was the first to prohibit slavery.

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.

Here's the deal with 'Bastard.' I loved that show, and for me, it was such a palate cleanser, going from writing urban vernacular and crime to, essentially, iambic pentameter. I loved the mythology of that world based on history, but what it came down to was money.

Growing up in Versailles is like growing up in a museum, and the people living there are almost the security.

Yes, I love going to fittings and talking about the history of a costume. For 'Versailles,' a play set in 1919, the costume designer told me that pocket squares had just been introduced. The tango was becoming fashionable in London, and dancers used them to mop their brows. I love to learn fascinating stuff like that.

I learned French in Tunis, along with Arabic. I also learned French history. I knew the entire history of the kings of France. And I was fascinated by Versailles.

Dance is very, very old. With Louis XIV at Versailles is where ballet started.

Wasn't the Treaty of Versailles, wasn't that disproportionately influenced by Jewish intellectuals? Don't get me wrong. I'm not pro-Holocaust.

India is gorgeous. There is no country in the world as stunning and versatile as India.

Their free verse was no form at all, yet it made history.

The earliest form in which romances appear is that of a rude kind of verse.

A glance at the history of European poetry is enough to inform us that rhyme itself is not indispensable. Latin poetry in the classical age had no use for it, and the kind of Latin poetry that does rhyme - as for instance the medieval 'Carmina Burana' - tends to be somewhat crude stuff in comparison with the classical verse that doesn't.

The refusal to accept that the black presence in Britain has a long and deep history is not just a symptom of racism, it is a form of racism. It is part of a rearguard and increasingly unsustainable defence of a fantasy monochrome version of British history.

One of the problems in the Ukrainian crisis is that very few Westerners know their history, or if they know it, what they learn is what we call the Russian version of history.

The Bible never tells us what Jesus looked like, and in the earliest surviving paintings of him, he is sometimes depicted as short-haired, sometimes as beardless, with no authoritative version winning out over the others. Yet around 400 A.D., all of the other competing images were replaced by the long-haired, bearded Jesus we know today.

Hockey historians say the handshake dates to English settlers in Canada, who preached an upper-class version of sportsmanship in the 19th century. Soon, tough kids in urban and prairie rinks began imitating imagined dukes and earls of the old country.

I just think that some version of the past in our culture is going to rise up and become dominant.

According to the scientific naturalist version of cosmic history, nature is a permanently closed system of material effects that can never be influenced by something from outside - like God, for example.

Social conditions that spur large numbers of people into action are ignored in favor of a Hollywood version of history focusing on one conquering hero. Since a movement for social change is embodied in its leader, death of the leader means death of the movement.

Couldn't I try. . . . Naturally, it wouldn't be a question of a tune . . . but couldn't I, in another medium? . . . It would have to be a book: I don't know how to do anything else. But not a history book: history talks about what has existed—an existant can never justify the existence of another existant

why distort a past that can no longer stand up for itself?

C'est la nuit, qui abolit tout, fatigues et passions. Les opprimés dorment, les révoltés aussi; le monde est enseveli, l'histoire reprend haleine. Il reste, dans une bulle de lumière entourée de néant, cette élite qui veille, tout occupée de ses cérémonies.