Quotes About History

The dispossession and relocation of peoples have been a worldwide process spanning five hundred years. The Virginia Company in general and the Sea-Venture in particular helped to organize the middle passage between Old World expropriation and New World exploitation.

As far back as 1602, Dutch people were buying shares in the United Dutch East India Company. This was the world's first popular stock, sold on the world's first popular stock exchange, which operated from a bridge over the Amstel River in Amsterdam. Crowds of eager investors gathered there, trying to get the attention of a stockbroker, and when their pushing and shoving got out of hand, police were called in to restore the peace.

Corporate profits are up fifty-five-fold since World War II, and the stock market is up sixtyfold. Four wars, nine recessions, eight presidents, and one impeachment didn't change that.

Today's problems come from yesterday's 'solutions'.

After four hundred years of betrayals and excuses, Indians recognize the new fashion in racism, which is to pretend that the real Indians are all gone.

not yet been realized or because it is in danger of disappearing from human sight: the stability of a tradition, which has its roots not only in a historical or cultural past, but within the innermost being of man. . . ."2

One can see [...] that the so-called governing powers are cardboard characters that mask the true ruling factors of our culture. Of course, those who manipulate the nation are not stupid. Rulers throughout history are only as powerful as the people who support them allow them to be.

Is this, Miriam wonders, what they call the march of history? And even if she doesn't fully understand, it doesn't mean she can't appreciate the need, the periodic need for some people to resort to gasoline, rags, and matches. Doesn't it always come to this? Isn't history as much about tearing things down as it is about building things up?

Tomorrow I'm going to Wong's, and I'm going to listen to the music of my own lack of thoughts. / Go, Gus says. Nobody's stopping you. / You don't see the beauty? Walt says. / Beauty of what? History of what? Alf says. / Everything. Shoelaces, farts, love, death, cantaloupes--all I have to do is remember. [Walt Kaplan/13 Gus's Highland Spa]

Well, it certainly seems that mankind learns nothing from history, so why should individuals learn anything from their own experience?" "I'm no expert, but that sounds like spurious logic to me.

The past lies like a nightmare upon the present. —Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

Art is long, life is short', goes the old adage, and arranging a limited number of paintings to represent the numerous developments and styles of Western art is by all standards a Herculean task.

the English lost at most 500 men, including only two lords, the Earl of Suffolk and the Duke of York. Shakespeare's Exeter gives these two noblemen a brilliant chivalric epitaph; history, however, adds its usual sour note by pointing out that York perished, not by the sword, but by suffocation or a heart attack after falling off his horse. He was quite fat.

and dust, the armored spearhead

Some of the conclusions that I draw are very different from the ethical views most people hold today. That, however, is not a ground for dismissing them. If every proposal for reform in ethics that differed from accepted moral views had been rejected for that reason alone, we would still be torturing heretics, enslaving members of conquered races, and treating women as the property of their husbands.

When rewritten in terms of the real world instead of the mysterious world of Mind, it made sense. 'Mind' was read as 'human self-consciousness'. The goal of history became the liberation of humanity; but this could not be achieved until the religious illusion had been overcome.

There are plenty of violent people, but for any randomly selected person today the chances of meeting a violent death at the hands of his or her fellow humans is lower now than it has ever been in human history.

Alexander singles out the Nazis' so-called euthanasia program as the root of all the horrendous crimes the Nazis later committed, because that program implied 'that there is such a thing as life not worthy to be lived'.

When history looks back, do you want to be counted among the oppressors? Or among the liberators? You've got to make that choice.

The moral unity to be expected in different ages is not a unity of standard, or of acts, but a unity of tendency. . . . At one time the benevolent affections embrace merely the family, soon the circle expanding includes first a class, then a nation, then a coalition of nations, then all humanity, and finally, its influence is felt in the dealings of man with the animal world. —W. E. H. LECKY, The History of European Morals

For all I know, war is "natural" to human beings—it certainly seems to have been a preoccupation for many societies, in very different circumstances, over a long period of history—but I have no intention of going to war to make sure that I act in accordance with nature.

During portages, each voyageur hauled two 90-pound packets of pelts on his back—a staggering 180 pounds, one packet suspended from a tumpline around his forehead, the other resting atop it on his back—a half mile at a time between designated rest stops, then returned for additional loads. Some of the portages went on for ten miles, and a notorious one lasted for forty.

As for what I'm doing now," he said, "I guess I'm trying to bring the past to life.

In the nineteenth century, maps often indicated watering holes for horses.