Quotes About History

I just feel like they're a network I have a good vibe with, and I'm very grateful. My first job with a network was 'General Hospital,' and that was ABC. I feel like I have so much history with them, that they treat their shows well, and they have good, discerning taste.

At moments of acute joy or sorrow, men and women throughout history have sung or reached for musical instruments to express the inexpressible. When minds are taut with emotional entanglement, there seems to be an inner compulsive instinct to release and harness this tension through the measured vibrations in the air that we call music.

Hindsight is the historian's necessary vice.

I was never Vice Chair of the Troops Out Movement.

In 1984, Geraldine Ferraro made history by participating in the first male-on-female vice presidential debate against George H. W. Bush. What should have been a groundbreaking moment for gender equality in politics became a forum for old gender expectations.

I'm going to be a vice president very much like George Bush was. He proved to be a very effective vice president, perhaps the most effective we've had in a couple of hundred years.

I'm the only American alive or dead who presided unhappily over the removal of a vice president and a president.

Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run for vice president, died from multiple myeloma. Frank Reynolds, the ABC anchorman, who I had talked to toward the end of his life, not knowing what he had, died from it. Later I found out that Frank McGee, who was the Today Show host, died from it.

George H.W. Bush had perhaps the greatest resume in American history. Director of the CIA, ambassador to the U.N., envoy to China, vice president of the United States and then, of course, president. It's staggering to contemplate one person achieving so much.

Concerning Poland, I can only say that the peoples of Central Europe and Hungary are a community in fate, to the death. Many of us would spill our blood for Poland any time. And vice versa: in an emergency, many Polish people would give his life to protect Hungarians. This has happened more than once over the course of history.

What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies and the quarrels of those who engage in contention for power.

Quibbling over the definition of genocide does nothing but help obscure the long history of vicious racism and undeniable suffering of Indigenous people in this country. It's bad enough whatever you want to call it.

Hurricane Sandy was one of the most vicious storm systems to hit the New York City area in nearly two centuries.

I've been interested in Japan since the 1930s, when I read about Japan's vicious crimes in Manchuria and China.

The British Empire passed quickly and with less humiliation than its French and Dutch counterparts, but decades later, the vicious politics of partition still seems to define India and Pakistan.

History laughs at both the victim and the aggressor.

Man has fallen victim to seduction since times immemorial.

The pillory and stocks, the gibbet, and even the whipping-post, have seen many a noble victim, many a martyr. But I cannot think any save the most ignoble criminals ever sat in a ducking-stool.

On Aug. 19, 1953, Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh of Iran became the first victim of a C.I.A. coup. Ten months later, on June 27, 1954, President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala became the second.

I have never been a victim of antisemitism - if you put to one side my war-time experience. That said, I am lucky not to have been sent into a concentration camp.

It's very attractive to people to be a victim. Instead of having to think out the whole situation, about history and your group and what you are doing... if you begin from the point of view of being a victim, you've got it half-made. I mean intellectually.

The argument for '12 Years a Slave' was that - yes, it's a beautiful film. Beautifully shot, beautifully acted. It's a real story, and these stories should be told. The problem is, if they're the only stories being told, then it makes Americans of African descent - it puts them into that victim category. And that was my problem with the movie.

Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

It would be a mind-boggling endeavor to try to identify each individual who claims to have been a survivor of victimization during this period of 24 years.