Quotes About History

Not everyone believed in marriage then. To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too—that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.

The past doesn't go away. You just can't see it anymore.

Oddly, Angela took to school like a bird to flight. She completed her homework almost before the teacher finished assigning it and read twice as many books as required. She had an understanding of history as if she'd lived it. Most surprising, she could stand in front of the classroom and read with the passion and clarity of a little southern Shakespearean thespian.

The Indians are what we have made them," said Dr. Reed. "Every war between us and the red man has been precipitated by broken treaties. If they have attacked the settlers, it is because we have made them what they are.

You never knew. Cultures were mine fields.

there is no substitute for walking in the landscape itself, or turning over dusty old pages in the archives of San Antonio.

They rode up the faint marks of the old trace where thousands of sojourners walking and riding both had crossed it and before them the buffalo far back in time. She joined the stream of humanity that had gone down that road, just one more story in a stream of narratives both likely and unlikely that were being told somewhere even now, by someone, in a far place.

Lascaux was in my time-stream, my ancestry, and Lascaux was the joy and the transport of stories. That's what lasts. It has lasted thirty thousand years.

Oh, I think we want to try some unusual methods in dealing with the Indian people. Honesty. Honoring our treaties with them. We will not use the military. Not on my agency.

I consider how we have crowded them and dispossessed them from the Atlantic on westward. They have been driven and harried and cheated. Perhaps they feel that by taking captives they will convince us to stop.

a country tamed and torn with plows and weighted down with stone buildings.

If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, 'I survived!

O pai d Delfina disse não à assimilação, sem saber que a libertação da pátria seria na língua dos brancos e sem imaginar ainda que os filhos dos assimilados iriam assumir o protagonismo da História.

No passado, os grandes homens da Europa em sessões magnas, festins e banhos de champanhe dividiram o continente negro em grandes e boas fatias, escravizaram, torturaram, massacraram e deportaram as almas destas terras. Hoje, gente oriunda das antigas potências colonizadoras diz que dá a sua mão desinteressada para ajudar os que sofrem. É preciso acreditar na mudança

According to the legal historian Akhil Reed Amar, before the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868, "the Supreme Court never—not once—referred to the 1792 decalogue as 'the' or 'a' bill of rights.

Never forget where you came from, Gina Attaviano, Alessandro said to her before he died. Then it will always be easy.

Slightly less time than it takes one woman to make one life, they managed to snuff out a million and a half lives.

Mankind has never invented a weapon that they did not use sooner or later.

War was like weather – always something to talk about.

I do not accept history as determinism. I embrace history as possibility [where] we can demystify the evil in this perverse fatalism that characterizes the neoliberal discourse in the end of this century.

The rightist sectarian wants to slow down the historical process, to domesticate time and thus to domesticate men and women.

A "hominização" não é adaptação: o homem não se naturaliza, humaniza o mundo. A "hominização" não é só processo biológico, mas também história.

I have a right to be angry, to show it and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle, just as I have a right to love and to express my love to the world and to use it as a motivational foundation for my struggle because I live in history at a time of possibility and not of determinism.

Just as objective social reality exists not by chance, but as the product of human action, so it is not transformed by chance. If humankind produce social reality, then transforming that reality is an historical task, a task for humanity.