Quotes About History

It is not well to forget the past," Douglass warned in a speech later in the 1880s. "Memory was given to man for some wise purpose. The past is . . . the mirror in which we may discern the dim outlines of the future and by which we may make them more symmetrical.

he would have repeatedly encountered irresistible words such as "freedom," "liberty," "tyranny," and the "rights of man." 19 Well before he read any serious history, he garnered and cherished a vocabulary of liberation.

Genealogical trees do not flourish among slaves. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1855

David W. Blight

Republican Ebon C. Ingersoll of Illinois, however

Education and Slavery were incompatible with each other. —FREDERICK DOUGLASS, 1845

Too many whites, he said, were "haunted with the idea, that to invest the colored race with equal rights is dangerous to the rights of white men." Such a "mischievous heresy" had for far too long paralyzed history.

Douglass insisted on remembrance before any action: "Perhaps there is too much past. But remember that all the present rests on all the past. Remember is as good a word as forget.

millennialist thought was a cluster of religious and secular ideas forged into a kind of national creed. In its more hopeful mode, it held that Christ would have a Second Coming in the "new Israel" of America, or at least that the country possessed a mission as a "redeemer nation" destined to perform a special role in history. Millennialism was an outlook on history, a disposition about

all history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons" echoes

For black Americans, Exodus is always contemporary, history always past and present.

Americans, Douglass believed, instinctively and culturally watched history and preferred not to act in it.

Later that spring and early summer, this seismic shift in Reconstruction policy and politics led to passage of a new Freedmen's Bureau bill, the first Civil Rights Act of American history, and the Fourteenth Amendment.

It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before.

It had to be the greatest irony in the history of mankind, he thought. The last Christian in the entire universe was a machine.

So bring on your inquiry. Present your case, and we'll present ours. Not because we give one single solitary damn for your prepackaged, predetermined 'impartial conclusions,' but because we care about history. Because unlike you, we do care about truth. And because someday your successors, whoever they may be, will have a record of what you actually do here and will revile your memory with all the contempt and all the disdain your actions will so richly merit.

And as he headed around the curve of the ship toward the bridge, he wondered distantly if he would go down in history as a footnote, or as the prime offender in a major interstellar incident.

Now, 2.6 million years after we started making tools, the last 0.016 per cent of our history as produced the most change, an exponential curve turning vertical. It's why I keep saying 'a recent idea' to anything less than a couple of centuries old. That change is young, its paint is still wet. And it's still external, due to mechanisation and its effects, it hasn't really changed humans except to make the affluent fat—and by affluent I mean anyone who shits in good drinking water.

When men in power decide that things need to be rebalanced at any cost, the violence is never brief and never really directed solely at the imbalance that supposedly inspired it. The rule of law becomes the rule of violence. Revenge becomes a synonym for justice. No city is safe from such horror, no nation, no time in all of history. Be ready to recognize the moment. Be always ready.

These days law thinks it's about nothin' but laws. Law don't remember it was once handed down from somewhere, that it once meant not just no, but was a way to live and a reason to live that way. Law now thinks nobody but politicians made it or remake it, so maybe it ain't a surprise some people don't care anymore about law, and even some lawmen don't understand the real reason for law.

Your past is my Future.

We've already been killed, all of us. It happened so long ago, we've forgotten it.

Les hommes ont inventé la guerre, la femme a inventé la résistance.

In a gourd that had been handed down for three centuries, a flower that would fade in a morning.