Quotes About History

When I hear the ignorant things people say about the war, about it all being over slavery, I want to shout that it isn't. It isn't that at all. Remember

Therapists talk a lot about how the past informs the present—how our histories affect the ways we think, feel, and behave and how at some point in our lives, we have to let go of the fantasy of creating a better past. If we don't accept the notion that there's no redo, much as we try to get our parents or siblings or partners to fix what happened years ago, our pasts will keep us stuck.

The number of family secrets is just staggering.

We enter people's lives and then realize we've walked into a deep and long history that shapes and gives form to our every moment.

If you look closely you'll find all my lovers inscribed on my skin.

History is hereditary only in this way: we, all of us, inherit everything, and then we choose what to cherish, what to disavow, and what do do next, which is why it's worth trying to know where things come from.

The past is an inheritance, a gift and a burden. It can't be shirked. You carry it everywhere. There's nothing for it but to get to know it.

The fight for women's rights hasn't come in waves. Wonder Woman was a product of the suffragist, feminist, and birth control movements of the 1900s and 1910s and became a source of the women's liberation and feminist movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The fight for women's rights has been a river, wending.

The Constitution is ink on parchment. It is forty-four hundred words. And it is, too, the accreted set of meanings that have been made of those words, the amendments, the failed amendments, the struggles, the debates—the course of events—over more than two centuries. It is not easy, but it is everyone's.

History isn't only a subject; it's also a method. My method is, generally, to let the dead speak for themselves. I've pressed their words between these pages, like flowers, for their beauty, or like insects, for their hideousness. The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

Wonder Woman isn't only an Amazonian princess with badass boots. She's the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman suffrage campaigns of the 1910s and ends with the troubled place of feminism fully a century later. Feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism....

All feminists are suffragists, but not all suffragists are feminists, as one feminist explained.

Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.

The study of history requires investigation, imagination, empathy, and respect. Reverence just doesn't enter into it.

The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist; it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the teller of truth.

There was the amount of time you'd known someone and then there was the way you'd spent that time.

The first contraceptive was crocodile dung," she whispered. "The Egyptians used it in 2000 BC.

Much later, the Seleucid Babylonians, who ruled over Mesopotamia as the successors of Alexander the Great, invented a symbol to replace this ambiguous 'gap' that the old Babylonians employed. Thus, the earliest known symbol for zero () is found on many Babylonian cuneiform clay tablets from around 300 BCE.

Time after time, history demonstrates that when people don't want to believe something, they have enormous skills of ignoring it altogether.

Don't call me a dinosaur. It isn't fair to the dinosaurs. What did a dinosaur ever do to you?

There's power in the night. There's terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when darkness itself was enough to make us cry out in fear....

Paradox is an overrated threat. There is...a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference. I frowned. There's...a law of conservation of history?

One rather thick volume was titled Means of Execution Through the Ages, and was placed with an elegant balance of nonchalance and availability at the eye level of anyone entering the room. As threats went, it was nearly subliminal—and perhaps it was placed there for that very reason.

Do you feel you should walk the same path because so many have walked it before you came