Quotes About History

If not immanence, the soul's bright anchor--blood passed from one to the other--what knowledge haunts each body, what history, what phantom ache? One man always low, in a grave or on the ground, the other up high, closer to heaven; one man always diseased, the other a body in service, plundered.

I think it's really cool, but Jimmy Eat World and Gin Blossoms did it better than anyone. People don't realize just how awesome the Arizona history is, especially for alternative music. Growing up, that's all I ever wanted to be was those two bands.

National identity is, of course, historically constructed; but it is nevertheless symbolized by a flag and an anthem, materialized by administrative acts and by material boundaries, the object of emotional projections that make people speak, make them act and even, sometimes, fight.

The earliest record of Adventist history is in Genesis 1. The supremacy and authority of Jesus is evident even in the Creation story.

When my mother told my father what had happened, he didn't want to believe it. "Nobody ever wants to believe what happens to the Jews," she said, "not even us.

There were new words for everything in their dead language put back to use. New words for the jets and their radar systems. New words for the tanks and the radios inside. But for this, for the hammer and beat of the forge, the Bible still sufficed.

What I'm trying to say, whether you want to take it seriously or not, is that you can't build Judaism only on the foundation of one terrible crime. It is about this obsession with the Holocaust as a necessary sign of identity. As your only educational tool. Because for the children, there is no connection otherwise. Nothing Jewish that binds.

I was attending the University of Alberta. I was going to be a high school teacher, like my parents. I failed - no, I didn't fail a class, I just barely passed. I really didn't try. It was Canadian history, through the plays of the time. My God, those were boring plays.

Hail, Lincoln! As the swift years lengthen Still more majestic grows thy fame.

Americans have dissipated their racial energy in an orgy of stone-breaking. In their few years they have broken more stones than did centuries of Egyptians, and they have done their work hysterically, desperately, almost as if they knew that the stones would some day break them.

In the king's bed is always found, just before it becomes a museum piece, the droppings of the black sheep.

The Past lies upon the Present like a giant's dead body.

Not to be deficient in this particular, the author has provided himself with a moral—the truth, namely, that the wrongdoing of one generation lives into the successive ones.

Nearly everything we understand about global warming was understood in 1979.

Motherhood goes back in history to a time when a father had no way of knowing his children. Fatherhood only became known when class patriarchal society had established itself and imposed monogamous marriage on women. Motherhood is like sun and rain and plants, a quality and product of nature which does not require laws or systems in order to exist.

Thus, after a period of about two thousand years the greatest crime became to worship a god other than the God of Moses, whereas injustice became a minor sin. I began to ask myself how this change had come about. Was it linked to a new order in which the female goddesses had been replaced by one male god?

for societies are built as much on what people choose to forget as what they remember

There are certain mortal moments and minutes that matter. Certain hingepoints in the history of each human. Some seconds are so decisive they shrink the soul, while others are spent, so as to stretch the soul.

How can we truly understand who we are unless we know who we were and what we have the power to become?

On the Black Sea, my father saw it begin. And on the Black Sea, seventy years on, I saw the beginning of its end.

I am always fascinated when people talk about "the forging of a nation." Most nations are forgeries, perpetrated in the last century or so.

It was a real revolution. But with one missing feature. That is the feeling in a people that "We have done it once, and if the new lot let us down, we can do it again!" It was that proud, menacing confidence which made the French revolution special. But it's not around in 21st-century Europe. After 1989, the people handed over liberty to the experts. Will they ever want it back?

Who invented political tolerance? The English invented it, it's something which has taken roots with some difficulty in Scottish politics.

History — the product, not the raw material — is a bottle with a label. For many years now, the emphasis of historical discussion has been laid upon the label (its iconography, its target-group of customers) and upon the interesting problems of manufacturing bottle-glass. The contents, on the other hand, are tasted in a knowing, perfunctory way and then spat out again. Only amateurs swallow them.