Quotes About History

America is the only country ever founded on the printed word.

La desigualdad son siglos de aprenderla.

este país el sector que más creció en los últimos veinte años no es la tecnología, no es el software; es la desigualdad, que creció más que en ningún otro momento de nuestra historia.

This kind of thing is why chivalry's dead." "Chivalry was a bunch of rules to justify men in chainmail burning villages down. I can live without that.

Graveyards are needed before churches.

I began waking up slowly into history, from which we do not emerge as from other nightmares.

A certain kind of hunger. To know what happened and at least ask why. Because the tikkun can't start until everyone asks what happened — not just the Jews but everybody.

I keep telling him that whatever secrets I contain are nothing compared to the average German's secrets. Just what was that smell carried south from Sachsenhausen into the village? Somebody had a father, mother, sister, brother who looked the other way. What are my secrets as against theirs?

Italy was about churches, Greece it's ruins; but Israel was about surviving and about feeling glad.

No wars, in the war-logged record of our species, have been terminal. Until now, when we know that nuclear war would be the death of our planet. It is beyond belief that any governments–those brief political figures–arrogate to themselves the right to stop history, at their discretion.

I had a sudden notion of why history is such a mess: humans do not live long enough. We only learn from experience and have no time to use it in a continuous and sensible way.

The English are very proud of their Parliament, and week in, week out, century after century, they have pretty good cause to be.

Looking at the past is like lolling in a rocking chair. It is so relaxing and you can rock back and forth on the porch, and never go forward.

Overall, out of the nineteen senior public colleges in Texas, seven had desegregated by 1959, and twelve refused to do so. Desegregation

We were very...anachronistic. The love that dared not speak its name.

It hit me then that my family is gone, really gone, and even though I have ll these kids, they'll never know my family, so in a way they'll never know me, because they don't know me with my family. I don't have a context for my children.

matter what, and given the wrong cultural and political circumstances, circumstances that have occurred with morbid regularity throughout history, this is a lesson that may well come with a suicide clause. That parents wish to foster a certain respect for legitimate authority is understandable, and probably important for the functioning of society as we know it. But to drill children in reflexive, no-questions-asked obedience is to beat a horse that is more than half-dead already.

I like endless historical family drama serials, but in real life, ghosts are way more annoying.

We are living history," I told my mother breathlessly one night after the radio had been turned off and we sat in complete silence. "I could do with a little less history, thank you," she replied crisply and returned to mending some socks.

Ironically, Dr. Cameron was a member of the Nuremberg tribunal that heard the case against Nazi war criminals

Bullets cannot be recalled. They cannot be uninvented. But they can be taken out of the gun.

Is there any good reason why we cannot extend our multi-cultural generosity to include another dimension? That of time. The past, too, is another country. Its ghosts may look strange and frightening and slightly misshapen in body and mind, but all the more reason then, to welcome them to our shores.

When the past is forgotten, the present is unforgettable

Probably human cruelty is fixed and eternal. Only styles change.