Quotes About History

Humankind, with its long history, is by now a corpse bound to a tree with the ropes of convention. If the ropes were cut, the corpse would simply fall to the ground. Prayer in one's mother tongue is a manifestation of that pathetic state. -from A Prayer in the Mother Tongue

Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity.

History Of Indian Philosophy, Vol. I, by Prof. Surendranath DasGupta (Cambridge University Press, 1922).

Even Napoleon had his Watergate.

What isn't remembered never happened. Memory is merely a record...you just need to rewrite that record.

Ce II siècle m'interesse parce qu'il fut, pour un temps fort long, celui des derniers hommes libres. Ence qui nous concerne, nous sommes peut-être déjà fort loin de ce temps-là.

Whichever came first—the act or the myth—human sacrifice is one of history's oldest locomotives. Much of literature is about scapegoats: comedy is the story of expulsion from the point of view of society; tragedy is the same story from the point of view of the outcast.

It was a kiss from the past.

He traced the genealogy of the feeling.

So there existed fathers who dealt in the present, who didn't drag ancient history around like a ball and chain. So there were men who were not neck-deep and sinking in the quagmire of the past.

Because this is the other thing about immigrants ('fugees, émigrés, travellers): they cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

A neutral place. The chances of finding one these days are slim, maybe even slimmer than Archie's pinball trick. The sheer quantity of shit that must be wiped off the slate if we are to start again as new. Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And not only must the place be neutral, but the messenger who takes you to the place, and the messenger who sends the messenger. There are no people or places like that left…

all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else mechanically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers ended ten years ago. For ten years Mickey had been saying, "The golden age of Luncheon Vouchers is over." And that's what Archie loved about O'Connell's. Everything was remembered, nothing was lost. History was never revised or reinterpreted, adapted or whitewashed. It was as solid and as simple as the encrusted egg on the clock.

at any time of the day, corduroy is a highly stressful fabric. Rent collectors wear it. Tax collectors, too. History teachers add leather elbow patches.

Well, you can't make old friends.

to put it in the modern parlance, this is a re-run. We have been here before. This is like watching TV in Bombay or Kingston or Dhaka, watching the same old British sitcoms spewed out to the old colonies in one tedious, eternal loop. Because immigrants have always been particularly prone to repetition - something to do with that experience of moving West to East or East to West or island to island. Even when you arrive, you're still going back and forth; your children are going round and round.

Race. Land. Ownership. Faith. Theft. Blood. And more blood. And more. And

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not deformed by it, either.

If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic, simply because it rarely appears sinister.

Two people creating the time of their own lives, protected somehow by love, not ignorant of history but not formed by it, either.

Poor Zora – she lived through footnotes.

My mind does not easily accept stately historical processions.

It looks backward, at the past, and it learns from what's gone before. Some people never learn." My