Quotes About History

The English imposed their language on Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and they weren't terribly nice about it.

MacHaffie, Barbara J. Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003. MacHaffie's is a well-respected book focusing on the too-often neglected contributions of women in the church generally, including theology.

Gravestones tell truth scarcely fourty years. Generations pass while some trees stand, and old Families last not three Oaks.' – Browne, Urn Burial, 1658

Historically, the most terrible things - war, genocide, and slavery - have resulted not from disobedience, but from obedience.

History is important. If you don't know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.

The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.

Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals the fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex. And in such as world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, as Albert Camus suggested, not to be on the side of the executioners.

In the long run, the oppressor is also a victim. In the short run (and so far, human history has consisted only of short runs), the victims, themselves desperate and tainted with the culture that oppresses them, turn on other victims.

No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

For the first time in the history of mankind, one generation literally has the power to destroy the past, the present and the future, the power to bring time to an end.

Today we know that World War II began not in 1939 or 1941 but in the 1920s and 1930s when those who should have known better persuaded themselves that they were not their brother's keeper.

There are those who say to you -- we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

Deux plus deux faisaient-ils quatre au temps des dinosaures?

It is not true that people learn nothing from history: they are marvellous at learning the wrong lessons.

The new Republican party thought that it did, and in its 1856 platform denounced slavery and polygamy together as 'twin relics of barbarism'. Or

The Republicans, however, refused to let power slip from their hands so easily. The carpetbag governments in Louisiana and South Carolina announced that Rutherford B. Hayes (1822–93), the Republican candidate, had carried those states and was therefore elected President by a margin of one electoral vote. It was the most outrageous piece of election-rigging in American history (which is saying something) and for a moment it looked as if it might precipitate a renewal of civil war. The

I just read an 800-page history of the Scottish Enlightenment and, honestly, I may as well just start it again now, because I cannot remember a single thing. I can barely remember where Scotland is.

The working class positively benefited from Hitler`s rule, under which the standard of living was raised till it became the highest in Europe.

The world has enough for everybody, but some minorities, the descendants of the same people that crucified Christ, and of those that expelled Bolvar from here and in their own way crucified him . . . have taken control of the riches of the world.

I am a great admirer of Leopold II, although I think that he should be destroyed in the memory of mankind and reduced to the state in which I presented him in my play, namely a dirty goblin who as soon as he does something of any interest must be raised in order to become a fully-fledged human being.

Getting stuck in the past is like guarding a cemetery.

Contrary to what Pakistani children are taught in schools, the Islamic ideology currently in vogue in Pakistan did not give birth to the country; it was born after Pakistan's creation in its present form.

Pakistan's unfortunate history may justify the description of Pakistan as being 'insufficiently imagined', but imagination is by definition not a finite process. An entity that is insufficiently imagined can be reimagined