Quotes About History

Grand Central Station

Dead men's words are so much more powerful than those of the living

spilled their blood on European soil

If you were given two lives, you'd spend one of them in Italy.

Paris was a museum displaying exactly itself.

Now all the mute objects of my life seem to tell my story, to stretch back in time, if I look closely enough.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since. Instead of everything that was happening now!

Parents are supposed to pass down physical traits to their children, but it's my belief that all sorts of other things get passed down, too: motifs, scenarios, even fates.

Some cities have fallen into ruin and some are built upon ruins but others contain their own ruins while still growing.

That's how people live, by telling stories. What's the first thing a kid says when he learns how to talk? "Tell me a story." That's how we understand who we are, where we come from. Stories are everything.

This whole country's stolen.

It was convenient to call them snipers, because if they weren't snipers, then what were they? The governor didn't say it; the newspapers didn't say it; the history books still do not say it, but I, who watched the entire thing on my bike, saw it clearly: in Detroit, in July of 1967, what happened was nothing less than a guerrilla uprising. The Second American Revolution.

One's country is like oneself. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.

All I know is this: despite my androgenized brain, there's an innate feminine circularity in the story I have to tell. In any genetic history. I'm the final clause in a periodic sentence, and that sentence begins a long time ago, in another language, and you have to read it from the beginning to get to the end, which is my arrival.

All of a sudden America wasn't about hamburgers and hot rods anymore. It was about the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock. It was about something that had happened for two minutes four hundred years ago, instead of everything that had happened since.

One's country was like one's self. The more you learned about it, the more there was to be ashamed of.

Miért tanulunk történelmet? Azért, hogy megértsük a jelent vagy azért, hogy megússzuk?

General John L. Throckmorton set up the headquarters of the 101st Airborne at Southeastern High, where my parents had gone to school.

But Borman does remember one telegram—from a sender he didn't know—and he still likes to talk about it. The telegram said, simply, "Thank you, Apollo 8. You saved 1968." That, Borman realized, made him feel happier than gazing up at the moon ever did.

So the first-man-on-the-moon profiles of Stafford were shelved, to be replaced by stories about Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong—and those were the stories that ultimately ran.

Though history is being made today, we all need to try and comprehend the years of effort by many people involved in the eventual lunar landing.

Lincoln lied about whether he was negotiating with the South to end the war. . . .

You can see what happened in the seventies. Up until then, the Supreme Court never saw a gender-based classification it didn't like or regarded as unconstitutional.

Yeah, history repeats itself; it's called tradition.