Quotes About History

The fact is if we followed the history of every little country in this world-in its dramatic as well as its quiet times- we would have no space left in which to live our own lives or to apply ourselves to our necessary tasks, never mind indulge in occasional pleasures, like swimming. Surely there is something to be said for drawing a circle around our attention and remaining within that circle. But how large should this circle be?

Unbeknownst to all involved, ancient ley-lines run underneath these two journeys—or, to put it in modern parlance, this is a rerun.

It's so funny how many people today really believe themselves to be the most advanced people who ever lived, 'the arc of history bending towards justice' or whatever the quote is. To me, being attendant to history is a kind of resistance. It offers the possibility of alternative worlds, that there is a reality outside the one we are living in.

Maybe there will always be men who say the right thing at the right time, who step forward like Thespis at just the right moment of history, and then there will be men like Archie Jones who are just there to make up the numbers. Or, worse still, who are given their big break only to come in on cue and die a death right there, centre stage, for all to see

She accepts everything that has happened to her as her destiny, no more surprised or alienated to be who she is than I imagine Cleopatra was to be Cleopatra. I

I couldn't help but notice the placidity of a small female household. In Tracey's home, disappointment in the man was ancient history: they never really had any hope in him, for he had almost never been at home.

A different kind of history from my mother's, the kind that is barely written down—that is felt.

They were touched by the same inheritance.

And before there was Clara and Archie there was Clara and Ryan. And there is no getting away from Ryan Topps. Just as a good historian need recognize Hitler's Napoleonic ambitions in the east in order to comprehend his reluctance to invade the British in the west, so Ryan Topps is essential to any understanding of why Clara did what she did. Ryan is indispensable.

Public art claiming to represent our collective memory is just as often a work of historical erasure and political manipulation. It is just as often the violent inscription of myth over truth, a form of "over-writing"—one story overlaid and thus obscuring another—modeled in three dimensions

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. To

Poezija rašoma ašaromis, apsakymai - krauju, o istorija - nematomu rašalu

If you are truly telling a South African story then it will be political — because you are dealing with people who lead political lives in an environment which is highly politically charged.

Armies of marching men told of that blight of nations old or young—war. These, and birds unnamable, and beasts unclassable, with dots and marks and hieroglyphics, recorded the history of a bygone people. Symbols they were of an era that had gone into the dim past, leaving only these marks, {Symbols recording the history of a bygone people.} forever unintelligible; yet while they stood, century after century, ineffaceable, reminders of the glory, the mystery, the sadness of life.

forgive me also that I didn't fight like Lord Byron for the happiness of captive peoples that I watched only risings of the moon and museums

I could write a treatise on the sudden transformation of life into archaeology

if we lose the ruins nothing will be left

I do not turn to history to draw from it an easy lesson of hope, but to confront my experience with that of others, to acquire something I might call universal compassion, and also a sense of responsibility, responsibility for the state of my conscience.

It is a paradox of human dynamics, of how the progress of new ideas often rests on the survival of old ways.

the Quraysh leadership and remained

The present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.

Like the dead-seeming, cold rocks, I have memories within that came out of the material that went to make me. Time and place have had their say.

But the inescapable fact that stuck in my craw, was: my people had sold me and the white people had bought me. . . . It impressed upon me the universal nature of greed and glory. —Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road

The present was too urgent to let the past intrude.