Quotes About History

The more we know about the past, the more we know what is not true about the present

To preserve our absolute categories or ideals at the expense of human lives offends equally against the principles of science and of history; it is an attitude found in equal measure on the right and left wings in our days, and is not reconcilable with the principles accepted by those who respect the facts.

History alone – the sum of empirically discoverable data – held the key to the mystery of why what happened happened as it did and not otherwise; and only history, consequently, could throw light on the fundamental ethical problems which obsessed him as they did every Russian thinker in the nineteenth century.

Kerensky, yes, Kerensky – I think we have to say one of the great wets of history.

I più celebrati utopisti dei tempi moderni... offrono un quadro pressochè statico degli attributi essenziali dell'uomo e, di conseguenza, una descrizione altrettanto statica della società perfetta ritenuta raggiungibile. Con ciò essi ignorano il carattere degli uomini in quanto esseri che si autotrasformano, che sono capaci di libere scelte - entro i limiti imposti dalla natura e dalla storia - fra scopi contrastanti e reciprocamente incompatibili.

History, only history, only the sum of the concrete events in time and space – the sum of the actual experience of actual men and women in their relation to one another and to an actual three-dimensional, empirically experienced, physical environment – this alone contained the truth, the material out of which genuine answers – answers needing for their apprehension no special sense or faculties which normal human beings did not possess – might be constructed.

Noi chiamiamo grandi storici solo quelli che non soltanto hanno il pieno controllo della documentazione fattuale ottenuta mediante l'impiego dei migliori metodi critici disponibili, ma possiedono altresì la profonda penetrazione immaginativa che caratterizza i romanzieri di talento. Dopo tutto - lo ricordava molto tempo fa lo storico inglese G.M. Trevelyan - Clio era una musa.

Only barbarians are not curious about where they come from, how they came to be where they are, where they appear to be going, whether they wish to go there, and if so, why, and if not, why not.

Dualism::In Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man I am outside of history. i wish i had some peanuts, it looks hungry there in the cage. i am outside of history. its hungrier than i thot.

But what have Cortes and Pizarro or the others to do with me? You carry them in your blood as I carry the blood of Montezume; expeditions of them are harbored by your heart and your mind carries their supply trains. You've changed your helmet for a frontier hat while I have changed my robes for overalls and a black leather jacket. The costumes may have changed but the blood is still the same, gringo.

Their successors, instead of ruling for the good of their subjects, tyrannize for their own; and they met with the fate of tyrants. No person not reckless of the past could wish to imitate them. The earlier and the later experiences of Athens prove, in fact, two things: that Attica produces good men, and that empire spoils them.

Art has no answers, only solutions, and resolutions... Art has only vision and revision... Art has only hope and more hope... again and again, against circumstance and history... What we hope life might be, again and again, against what we see it has been. In hope, there is a reason to continue.

The Past: Our cradle, not our prison; there is danger as well as appeal in its glamour. The past is for inspiration, not imitation, for continuation, not repetition.

You, the Spirit of the Settlement ... Not understand that America is God's crucible, the great melting-pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming Here, you stand, good folk, think I, when I see them at Ellis Island, here you stand in your fifty groups, with your fifty languages and histories, and your fifty blood hatreds and rivalries...

If I have come further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand

A description of Zaira as it is today should contain all Zaira's past. The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

Now that he is no longer here I should be interested in so many things: philosophy, politics, history. I follow the news, read books, but they befuddle me. What he meant to say is not there, for he understood something else, something that was all-embracing, and he could not say it in words but only by living as he did.

Ma la città non dice il suo passato, lo contiene come le linee d'una mano, scritto negli spigoli delle vie, nelle griglie delle finestre, negli scorrimano delle scale,nelle antenne dei parafulmini,nelle aste delle bandiere, ogni segmento rigato a sua volta di graffi,seghettature,intagli,svirgole.

The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past:

Os futuros não realizados são apenas ramos do passado: ramos secos.

Clarice, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Clarice as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.

Le città sono un insieme di tante cose: di memoria, di desideri, di segni d'un linguaggio; le città sono luoghi di scambio, come spiegano tutti i libri di storia dell'economia, ma questi scambi non sono soltanto scambi di merci, sono scambi di parole, di desideri, di ricordi. Il mio libro s'apre e si chiude su immagini di città felici che continuamente prendono forma e svaniscono, nascoste nelle città infelici.