Quotes About History

You know why they call it the Garden State, don't you? It's like the Garden of Eden-- everyone is from there originally, but no one you meet actually lives there anymore.

The whole story of the comfort women, the system of forced sexual slavery, the medical experiments of Unit 731, is not something that is in the US psyche. That is changing because many books are coming out.

As the Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel warned years ago, to forget a holocaust is to kill twice.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

The Rape of Nanking did not penetrate the world consciousness in the same manner as the Holocaust or Hiroshima because the victims themselves had remained silent.

The spoken word vanished with the wind. Likewise, the unrecorded life disappears as if it never existed.

Perhaps the most fascinating character to emerge from the history of the Rape of Nanking is the German businessman John Rabe. To most of the Chinese in the city, he was a hero, "the living Buddha of Nanking," the legendary head of the International Safety Zone who saved hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives.

So sickening was the spectacle that even the Nazis in the city were horrified, one proclaiming the massacre to be the work of "bestial machinery.

history have noted that the sheer concentration of power in government is lethal—that only a sense of absolute unchecked power can make atrocities like the Rape of Nanking possible.

There are several important lessons to be learned from Nanking, and one is that civilization itself is tissue-thin.

And maps can really point to places Where life is evil now: Nanking; Dachau. —WILLIAM C. KIRBY, Professor of Modern Chinese History and Chairman of the Department of History

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin—one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

May luck be our companion May friends stand by our side May history remind us all Of Ireland's faith and pride. May God bless us with happiness May love and faith abide.

A scholar's ink lasts longer than a martyr's blood.

The older the fiddle, the sweeter the tune.

But most- and worst- of all, as we and all the world slowly learned about the full extent of Hitler's Final Solution, we realized that all Germans, no matter what they had suffered or whether they had participated in any way in the atrocities, would bear guilt, shame and dishonor, probably forever.

My German Question: Growing Up in Nazi Berlin, Peter Gay Nazi Berlin

The Reader, Bernhard Schlink

Free schools were an invention of the Devil or the Yankees, which amounted to practically the same thing.

We in our secular, rationalist world are utterly unprepared for such existential-spiritual spasms. For one thing, we do not study the history of religion in any serious way, even for explanations of religious phenomena. Instead, we look for sociological explanations, or economic explanations, or even political explanations, and we do so precisely because we find it almost impossible to posit spiritual appetites and spiritual passions as independent, primary forces in human history.

Each and every one of these leaders was a Negro citizen of the United States. They had earned the right to guide us, help us, not because their colored forebears helped free us and defend us in the Revolutionary War, in the War of 1812, in the Union Army of Lincoln and Grant, in the First and Second World Wars, in Korea, but because they were part of our whole, part of each of us, with the same stakes and goals.

O mundo pode identificar-se com um mártir desamparado. Mas seis milhões de judeus foram perseguidos e assassinados na Alemanha e o mundo fica perturbado intelectualmente, mas emocionalmente calmo, tratando de sua própria vida, porque, ora, quem pode identificar-se com seis milhões de mortos?

For the first three weeks in June, the conquistadors and their Indian allies fought skirmishes on the outskirts of the city.

The Battle of Otumba was fought on July 7, 1520. The victorious Spaniards would never forget it; nor would the Aztecs forget the humiliation of their loss. In the days that followed, the Aztecs watched Cortés withdraw to Tlaxcala. They knew he was not defeated.