Quotes About History

Yes. I know all about how the French burned my people alive in cauldrons of molasses. How they mutilated and tortured Haitian prisoners, digging pits on the beach and waiting for the tide to roll in so they would drown. In Port-au-Prince," I tell them, "the emperor's soldiers invited all mulâtres to a ball. Then at the stroke of midnight, he announced that the men would be put to death. They killed them right there, in front of their wives.

There are still many causes worth sacrificing for, so much history yet to be made.

You may not always have a comfortable life and you will not always be able to solve all of the world's problems at once but don't ever underestimate the importance you can have because history has shown us that courage can be contagious and hope can take on a life of its own.

In the early 1900s an American named Fanny Bullock Workman unfurled a 'Votes For Women' banner high in the Karakorams, and left her visiting card in a glass jar on one of the peaks.

History is made not of facts set in stone but of the stories we tell.

History is not our guide, it is not our friend. It is a passing stranger, one which shadows legend, sprinkling it with the seeds of truth.

History is the fruit of power, but power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous. The ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.

The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.

We are never as steeped in history as when we pretend not to be, but if we stop pretending we may gain in understanding what we lose in false innocence. Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.

Facts are not created equal: the production of traces is always also the creation of silences.

For Trouillot, history is always material; it begins with bodies and artifacts, agents, actors, and subjects. His emphasis on process, production, and narration looks to the many sites where history is produced: the academy, the media, and the mobilization of popular histories by a variety of participants.

French Caribbean island of Martinique, a tiny territory less than one-fourth the size of Long Island, imported more slaves than all the U.S. states combined.

the burden of the past is alleviated when sociohistorical conditions…have changed so much that practitioners face a choice between complete oblivion and fundamental redirection…alchemists become chemists or cease to be…

Deprived of our memories we are deprived of our very selves. Without our histories we are vacated. We may walk and talk and eat and sleep but, in truth, we are nobody.

The honor of a nation has to actually come from the nation, though, and its representatives. History will record it and our allies will remember it, as will our adversaries.

Life can only happen between the past i.e. the history and the future i.e. the mystery. Both these are non-existential, thus insignificant. Between history and mystery lies now, let it be capitalized, seed your life every moment and get Mickeymized.

Prostitution has been called the oldest profession and prostitutes have always been a part of the history of the human race. So have serial killers, but they managed to elude attention until the infamous Jack the Ripper killed five prostitutes between August and November 1888 in London.

My story is a story of very ordinary people during extrgordinarily terrible times. Times of which I hope will never, never come again. It is for all of us ordinary people all over the world to see that they do not.

It is often said that Anne symbolizes the six million victims of the Holocaust. I consider this statement wrong. Anne's life and death were her own individual fate, an individual fate that happened six million times over.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.

We sometimes feel that we have been really understood, but it was always long ago, by someone now dead.

The total history of almost anyone would shock almost everyone.

History is in a manner a sacred thing, so far as it contains truth; for where truth is, the supreme Father of it may also be said to be, at least, inasmuch as concerns truth.

The mists remain of the false glory that erupts from history.