Quotes About History

this country since 1865 has an unenviable record for political violence. Four presidents, plus the attempts on Truman and both Roosevelts—as you know, Teddy was actually wounded, in his unsuccessful campaign in 1912—not to mention Huey Long. There isn't a country west of the Balkans with any kind of the same record. The Prime Ministers of England go everywhere with a single bodyguard.

They felt the poorhouse would always be there, exempt from time. That some residents died, and others came, did not occur to them; a few believed that the name of the prefect was still Mendelssohn. In a sense the poorhouse would indeed outlast their homes. The old continue to be old-fashioned, though their youths were modern. We grow backward, aging into our father's opinion and even into those of our grandfathers.

Sad business, being a Negro man, always underpaid, their eyes don't look like our eyes, bloodshot, brown, liquid in them about to quiver out. Read somewhere some anthropologist thinks Negroes instead of being more primitive are the latest thing to evolve, the newest man.

One hundred thirty years after Abe Lincoln, re Republicans have got the anti-black vote and it's bigger than any Democratic Presidential candidate can cope with.

By the time these words are read, the centuries-old cedar, hemlock, and balsm of the cutblock known as Leah Block 2 will be a distant memory, long since processed into siding, two-by-fours, perhaps even the paper that has been recycled into the pages of this book.

The wounds Mao sought to reopen had been inflicted during the nineteenth century when the future superpowers were grinding against each other like so many tectonic plates. The world as we know it was forming then, along fault lines of race, culture, and geography.

The occupation of Japan was the last immodest exercise in the colonial conceit known as "the white man's burden."2

You must remember what you are and what you have chosen to become, and the significance of what you are doing. There are wars and defeats and victories of the human race that are not military and that are not recorded in the annals of history. Remember that while you're trying to decide what to do.

If at first you don't succeed, just study the life of Abraham Lincoln.

Let me tell you, Mr. teacher when you say you'll make me right, in five hundred years of fighting not one Indian turned white

I always felt like I was meant to have been born in another era, another time.

Every Christian who studies history can only grieve over the atrocities that have been committed in the name of God by people who refuse to follow His ways.

Religious fundamentalism, magical thinking and self-delusion, have been justifications for some of the most horrific atrocities in human history.

Strike from mankind the principle of faith and men would have no more history than a flock of sheep.

Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history therefore we must be saved by faith.

A family's photograph album is generally about the extended family and, often, is all that remains of it.

People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors.

I grew up in a family of secrets; there was a lot of pathology in the family.

I'm extremely proud of my family's record of public service to Massachusetts and the nation.

I would like to go to Russia very much — although the bastards murdered half my family.

The black family unit that had survived 150 years of slavery was decimated in less than 30 years by welfare payments that stopped if the family structure remained intact.

After a while, a surprising theme emerged. The single most important thing you can do for your family may be the simplest of all: Develop a strong family narrative.

I cannot say who, precisely, came up with the idea of a Stone Age family.

Perserverance. . .that's been the story of my family.