Quotes About History

Even a brief glimpse of what we were is valuable to help understand what we are

Throughout the history of the Deutschritter the German genius is very evident, romantic idealism implemented with utter ruthlessness.

There is a story. . . which is fairly well known, told about when missionaries came to Africa, that they had the Bible and we, the natives, had the land. And then they said, "Let us pray," and we dutifully shut our eyes. And when we opened them, why, they now had the land and we had the Bible.

So too I would say we South Africans will survive and prevail only together, black and white bound together by circumstance and history as we strive to claw our way out of the morass that was apartheid racism. Up and out together, black and white together. Neither group on its own could or would make it. God had bound us, manacled us, together. In a way it was to live out what Martin Luther King, Jr., had said, "Unless we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters]

Scots have long memories, and they're not the most forgiving of people.

It's a good country for myths. Things seem to take root here.

I could feel the hair rising on my forearms, as though with cold, and rubbed them uneasily. Two hundred years. From 1945 to 1743; yes, near enough. And women who traveled through the rocks. Was it always women? I wondered suddenly.

Ian—is that by chance Ian Murray?" Grey asked, but then answered himself. "I suppose it must be; how many Mohawks can there be named Ian?

How many 'inventions' are really memories, of the things we once knew?

Not the historians. No, not them. Their greatest crime is that they presume to know what happened, how things come about, when they have only what the past chose to leave behind—for the most part, they think what they were meant to think, and it's a rare one that sees what really happened, behind the smokescreen of artifacts and paper.

You know historians - can't leave a puzzle alone

I wondered what sort of man - or woman, perhaps? - had lain here, leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the enduring rocks that sheltered them.

the difference between an American and an Englishman. An Englishman thinks a hundred miles is a long way; an American thinks a hundred years is a long time.

Now they think you're mad; then they thought you were a witch. Cultural mores

Papa says that wars take three generations to fade from the ground where they're fought. And from what I've seen, Friends have quite long memories, as well." "He might just have a point.

You know Mountgerald, the big house at the end of the High Street? There's a ghost there, a workman on the house who was killed as a sacrifice for the foundation. In the eighteenth century sometime; that's really fairly recent," he added thoughtfully.

The small, homely scar of a smallpox vaccination. Rain

One never stops to think what underlies romance. Tragedy and terror, transmuted by time.

We look in the mirror and see the shades of other faces looking back through the years; we see the shape of memory, standing solid in an empty doorway.

Comment sont vos selles, grandpere? - Germain to Jamie.

James Alexander Malcolm MacKenzie Fraser.

Diana Gabaldon

There was a third brother who became a curate, but I don't know much about him…

Bodies under the foundation, though—that's where a lot of the local ghosts come from.