Quotes About History

Europe was created by history. America was created by philosophy.

Of course it's the same old story. Truth usually is the same old story.

I don't think there will be a woman prime minister in my lifetime.

Bread is for us a kind of successor to the motherly breast, and it has been over the centuries responsible for billions of sighs of satisfaction.

Corn, beans, and squash are as constantly wedded in Indian cooking today as they were in the past. Sometimes meat is added: for the early Indians that meat would often have been puppy.

Less is paid for food, in terms of percentage of income, in North America than anywhere else on earth since the history of universal "incomes" began.

First you took beeffat chopped with sheep's stomachs and cows' udders, soaked them in milk, and suspended the mixture in water and potash, at blood heat.

Great-Uncle Powell, an archaeologist, had spent most of his time digging about in foreign parts.

Señor Lam says those Los Angeles riots were one of the largest mass lynchings in United States history. Only ten men were arrested, only four were convicted, and even they will soon be released. No one in that nation ever pays for any crime against people who look different.

Once I've mastered the art of pretending that I don't care what other kids think of me, I start to pay attention in class, discovering that I love library research for history term papers about ancient lands. It feels like a form of time travel.

Never doubt that you can change history. You already have.

I want to do something very important. Like fly into the past and make it come out right.

When I was a child, I first noticed that neither history as I was taught it nor the stories I was told seemed to lead to me. I began to fix them.

It was a little skirmish across a century.

When Mr. William Faraday sat down to write his memoirs after fifty-eight years of blameless inactivity he found the work of inscribing the history of his life almost as tedious as living it had been, and so, possessing a natural invention coupled with a gift for locating the easier path, he began to prevaricate a little upon the second page, working his way up to downright lying on the sixth and subsequent folios.

Why it is that a garment which is honestly attractive in, say, 1910 should be honestly ridiculous a few years later and honestly charming again a few years later still is one of those things which are not satisfactorily to be explained and are therefore jolly and exciting and an addition to the perennial interest of life.

Different versions of a true story

Such is the amazing power of stories to link us to our past and lead us all the way back to the present.

I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America—or, more precisely, it is the story of Americans. It is not a very pretty story: the story of a people is never very pretty.

Aside from the privilege of actually being white, they had been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance. A privilege Good Negro Girls had been denied by our history of duty, obligation, and discipline

Sarah Pomeroy, in her careful study, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves

Most scholars now put the number of people killed for the crime of witchcraft from the late fifteenth century through the seventeenth century at between forty and fifty thousand

What a pity, when Christopher Columbus discovered America, that he ever mentioned it.