Quotes About History

Although there are those who wish to ban my books because I have used language that is painful, I have chosen to use the language that was spoken during the period, for I refuse to whitewash history. The language was painful and life was painful for many African Americans, including my family. I remember the pain.

A legend is an old man with a cane known for what he used to do. I'm still doing it.

I know people get tired of hearing it but black people have got to keep saying it, throwing our conditions up into these people's faces until something is done about the way they have treated us. We've just got to keep it in front of their eyes and their ears like the Jews have done. We've got to make them know and understand just how evil the things are that they did to us over all these years and are still doing to us today.

His life changed history. His courage changed lives.

We often tend to think of the Father as transcendent and far off in heaven; similarly, the Son may seem far removed in history and thus also relatively unknowable. But the Holy Spirit is active within the lives of believers; he is resident within us. He is the particular person of the Trinity through whom the entire Triune Godhead currently works in us.

We have memorized America, how it was born and who we have been and where. In ceremonies and silence we say the words, telling the stories, singing the old songs. We like the places they take us. Mostly we do.

Humor was not important only for me, humor was important for this nation for centuries, to survive, you know.

History suggests that capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom. Clearly it is not a sufficient condition.

History suggests that Capitalism is a necessary condition for political freedom.

Our minds tell us, and history confirms, that the great threat to freedom is the concentration of power. Government is necessary to preserve our freedom, it is an instrument through which we can exercise our freedom; yet by concentrating power in political hands, it is also a threat to freedom. Even though the men who wield this power initially be of good will and even though they be not corrupted by the power they exercise, the power will both attract and form men of a different stamp.

You can't fix Korea. Not even a hundred of you or a hundred of me can fix Korea. The Japs are out and now Russia, China, and America are fighting over our shitty little country.

Reading Group Guide "History has failed us, but no matter." How does the opening line reflect

was still hard for a Korean to become a Japanese citizen, and there were many who considered such a thing shameful—for a Korean to try to become a citizen of its former oppressor.

For me, the pachinko business and the game itself serve as metaphors for the history of Koreans in Japan—a people caught in seemingly random global conflicts—as they win, lose, and struggle for their place and for their lives.

History has failed almost everybody who is ordinary.

History has failed us, but no matter. Kyunghee would be waiting for her at home. -Pachinko

nearly every Korean-Japanese person I met in Japan had some historical connection or social connection with the pachinko business—one of the very few businesses in which Koreans could find employment and have a stake.

And "Immortality" mildews ... in the museums of the moon

I come from a long line of body snatchers, probably the top-notch body snatchers in America. No make that the world. Some people might think it's gross digging up bones or corpses, but who asked them? It's no big deal, but then I've been doing it since I got out of diapers.

It will be as if we never existed if our history cannot be read.

Watching a performance of warriors, I was told, "This fighter's tradition is six hundred years old." And I saw a performance so mired in ritual— As if nothing valid had happened in six hundred years. We must honor the classical without being irrelevant.

History is essential to our understanding of the present. Unless we are conscious of the way in which we came to this point in time as a people, then we shall never fully be able to plan the present and the future. We need to know what roots are still alive. We need to know how things came to be so that we can project from here. We also need to know the failures of the past so that we can avoid repeating them.

Ever since that day in Chicago, whenever I see such scenes, I think of a quote by Billat-Savarin, the eighteenth-century 'modern' gastronome, well known for his writings and meditations on the physiology of taste and for his famous dictum 'We are what we eat.' But he also wrote even more revealingly: 'The destiny of a nation depends on how it feeds itself.

If one fights in the arena forgetful of the past, Success will elude him who ignores what he should know.