Quotes About History

When I die, I want to see Malcom X, Lumumba, my father, and I want to be able to look them in the eye

I go all the way back to the Founding Fathers. I see the miracle of the founding of this country. It is so special, it's so unique. What needs to be emulated around the world is the United States.

If you read our Founding Fathers, people like Benjamin Franklin and Jefferson - what we're doing now in this country is making them roll over in their graves.

Well, my father's people were Mormon, and had immigrated not long after Brigham Young had settled Utah.

Southern women often marry a man knowing that he is the father of many little slaves. They do not trouble themselves about it.

I never exploited my father's role in helping Jews avoid the concentration camps...

These gentlemen are the moral equivalents of America's founding fathers.

My father saw two black men lynched on his street in Cartersville, as a child. And I think seeing two black businessmen - not vagrants - hanging from trees as a child was traumatic for him.

My father was an accountant and his father was a typographer.

My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.

I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.

The tracing of a child's lineage and its name with reference to the father, though it has lasted for many thousands of years, has not become any the more natural or reasonable as a result.

On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.

Almost all the early Christian Fathers were opposed to the death penalty, even though it was of course standard practice across the ancient world.

Throughout American history our presidents have invoked our nation's founding fathers. This is particularly true of recent presidents.

My father, Charles Seeger, got me into the Communist movement. He backed out around '38. I drifted out in the 50's.

I'm a huge fan of the Navy. My father was a Naval historian, and I've been studying Naval battles forever.

In medieval Europe, childbirth was a leading cause of death. So widowed fathers with children were quite common, meaning stepmothers were equally common.

What I fear is not being forgotten after my death, but, rather, not being enough forgotten. As we were saying, it is not our books that survive, but our poor lives that linger in the histories.

All religions have periods in their history which are looked back to with retrospective fear and trembling as eras of persecution, and each religion has its own book of martyrs.

The violent have been victorious for most of history because they kindled the fear with which everyone is born.

The past is always attractive because it is drained of fear.

Uncertainty and fear and ignorance about immigrants, about people who are different, has a history as old as our Nation.

I have also written a book about the Giving of the Torah, and a book on the Days of Awe, and a book on the books of Israel that have been written since the day the Torah was given to Israel.