Quotes About History

Some people would look at this and see junk," I said. "Others see history.

Where I live is one of the places where suburban stories were first mass-produced. They were stories then for displaced Okies and Arkies, Jews who knew the pain of exclusion, Catholics who thought they did, and anyone white with a steady job.

My first restoration was on 'Napoleon,' trying to put the French version in with the English version, and it was most unsatisfactory.

John Howard, willing to apologise to home owners for rising interest rates, would not say sorry to Aborigines. He refused to condone what he referred to as 'a black armband version' of history, preferring a jingoistic nationalism.

In Haiti, as I understand it, storytelling and history itself are not a business of necessarily elucidating facts or the truth of an incident, but finding the version that is most entertaining and therefore will get retold and live in immortality.

'She's Dynamite' was a 100 years ago, and I recorded that song because the company thought that it was a great song and it was hot. That was the beginning of rock n' roll, and I guess they thought it would be a BB King version of rock n' roll.

When you are playing somebody who did exist, and there is good source material on them, whether it is a biography or archives or experts, you would be stupid not to delve into them. But there is a point in the process where you leave the books alone, and instead, you focus on the script and creating your version.

'Ida' doesn't set out to explain history. That's not what it's about. The story is focused on very concrete and complex characters who are full of humanity with all its paradoxes. They're not pawns used to illustrate some version of history or an ideology.

One of the great challenges of being a modern historian is interviewing multiple people who were all there for something, some event. No one's version matches up 100% with other people's, even if it's three or four people on a conference call.

The forward march of American literature is usually chronicled by way of its male novelists. There is little sense, in that version of the story, that women writers of those eras were doing much worth remembering.

In the past, once a movie musical was made, it was believed that you were left with that version, good or bad, for posterity.

There's so many versions of 'Red Riding Hood.' It goes back 700 years.

There is very much a sense of different versions of storytelling within our 'Camelot' - who tells those stories, who creates them, who shifts them.

I just feel that I don't agree with sensationalized versions of history or me. Any version that's sensationalized.

For people like me, who have got their flags and wars mixed up, I think it should be pointed out that there may have been only one War of 1812, but there are four distinct versions of it - the American, the British, the Canadian, and the Native American.

How does the past ambush us? How can we be accurate about what happened, how can we be true to it? And can war be declared over? And can we ever evolve from the notion of war, of nations, of us versus them?

Who has fully realized that history is not contained in thick books but lives in our very blood?

History isn't something you look back at and say it was inevitable, it happens because people make decisions that are sometimes very impulsive and of the moment, but those moments are cumulative realities.

Don't clap too hard - it's a very old building.

Our flag honors those who have fought to protect it, and is a reminder of the sacrifice of our nation's founders and heroes. As the ultimate icon of America's storied history, the Stars and Stripes represents the very best of this nation.

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!

Tim Allen is a valuable part of the Disney ABC family and has been for a very, very long time.

I know the families that I photograph extremely well, and I've known them for a very long time.

Typically, highway bridges have about 50 years. But over in England, they have iron bridges approaching 250 years. In France, there are Roman aqueducts that are approaching 2,000 years old. So a bridge can last a very long time if it's built properly in the first place and then maintained properly.