Quotes About History

Womanist religious scholars want to unearth the hidden voices in history, scripture, and the experiences of contemporary marginalized African American women to discover fragments that can create a narrative for the present and future.

Everything was out in our crowded lawn, really—love, anger and jealousy. History and intimacy. You could breath it in, thick as fog. I wanted to yell, Get out of our yard!

I asked the cardiologist why an electrocardiogram was called an EKG, instead of an ECG. He said, "Nazis. Nazis invented the machine." After he left, I found a napkin on my breakfast tray and wrote that down: EKG = Nazis.

Unfortunately it is not possible to destroy our history. It lives inside us, probably the more powerful for our attempts to bury it. We and our families are likely to pay a high price in the present for trying to block out the past. Attempts to cover up family history tend to fester, influencing others born long after the original painful experiences and relationships.

Most non-Christian philosophies consider history to be the enemy of truth. Feminism shares this suspicion of history.

We didn't call it World War I. How could we imagine there'd be a second?

WE all need a story of where we came from and how we got here.

The 'I' [Je] who writes is alien to her own writing at every word because this 'I' uses a language that is alien to her; this 'I' [Je] experiences what is alien to her since this 'I' [Je] cannot be un ecrivain. J/e poses the ideological and historical question of feminine subjects.

L'hétérosexualité allait tellement de soi qu'elle n'avait pas de nom [par le passé]. C'est la norme sociale. C'est le contrat social. C'est un régime politique.

Me parecía que era necesario salvar con las palabras todo lo que la historia, la Historia grande, es decir, la de los hombres, había hecho impreciso, había condenado o idealizado [con respecto a las mujeres].

There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert.

Let me put it this way. Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples.

Yes, carbon paper, if any of you out there are old enough to remember what that was. Why, in those days we not only used carbon paper but when you phoned somebody you actually got an answer from a human being on the other end..

The Negro people of America... have cut our forests, tilled our fields, built our railroads, fought our battles, and in all of their trials they have manifested a simple faith, a grateful heart, a cheerful spirit, and an undivided loyalty .

Black history is American history.

You're going to relegate my history to a month.

I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.

In the long run, the fall of one civilization is very much like the fall of another. Only the land remains.

At one time the Irish had been forbidden by English law to educate their children, to own a horse worth more than five pounds, to play the Irish pipes, to wear the color green… the list went on and on. Most of the oppressive statutes were no longer enforced, but the shamed submission they had engendered remained.

The achievements and discoveries of a great but dying society can bring light to a young and growing one.

My ancestors came over on the boat. Oh, not the Mayflower, but the boat after that. What did your ancestors come over on, Godfrey?

Love denied, and the somatic experience of that denial, is?as de Rougemont recognized?the hidden, and gnostic/heretical, thread of Western History.

Ninety percent of our earliest examples of Latin classical writings are Carolingian copies.

Charlemagne's educational and cultural campaign was momentous for its preservation of the classical past and for its effects on medieval society. The level of literacy never again sank as low as it had in pre-Carolingian times.