Quotes About History

How could people let go of their old things, when each told a part of their story? Old things were a literature, a narrative.

In World War One, they called it shell shock. Second time around, they called it battle fatigue. After 'Nam, it was post-traumatic stress disorder.

The language itself, whether you speak it or not, whether you love it or hate it, is like some bewitchment or seduction from the past, drifting across the country down the centuries, subtly affecting the nations sensibilities even when its meaning is forgotten.

Could it be that racism is a sort of historical invention, a Satanic hoax?

History writes the word 'Reconciliation' over all her quarrels.

Y]ou cannot successfully navigate the future unless you keep always framed beside it a small clear image of the past.

Vele jaren zijn intussen voorbijgegaan. Michiel is nu driënveertig. Hij heeft de kranten goed gelezen en hij weet dat er sinds die avondwandeling met Dirk gevochten is in Indonesië, Joegoslavië, Hongarije, Noord-Ierland, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodja, Kongo, Algerije, Israël, Jordanië, Ecuador, Dominica, Cuba, Honduras, Mozambique, Kashmir, Bengalen, en nog veel, veel landen meer.

We all bear traces of the starvation struggle which for so long made up the life of the race.

What is a great man who has made his mark upon history? Every time, if we think far enough, he is a man who has looked through the confusion of the moment and has seen the moral issue involved; he is a man who has refused to have his sense of justice distorted; he has listened to his conscience until conscience becomes a trumpet call to like-minded men, so that they gather about him, and together, with mutual purpose and mutual aid, they make a new period in history.

The people of the stone houses are gone, whirled like chaff over dry fields, scattered by the war dances of dust devils. what remains — sculpted walls, curved shards, small stores of corn — says little. What we know is that they lived like birds. That from their doorways they looked out and out over shimmering trees into the arms of sky, And that one day, light-boned, weightless as any winged flock before a journey, they rose and flew. —Mesa Verde

To take a single and salient instance, to study the folk-epos of Russia, alive in the mouths of the people up to and beyond the time of Peter the Great, is to look at Homer with new and wider opened eyes.

About 10 000 years ago, males and females were acting equitably and were treating one another as equals, and then males took over the power, because they have physical power and physical strength.

What many people failed to do then (and continue to fail to do today) is admit what happened, understand the context, and make sure those circumstances never happen again. The winter soldiers showed us that redemption is possible when truth is spoken. Nothing can change until we acknowledge what is—as I have learned over time.

But it's true, she thought, nobody really knows a thing about another's past. Why should we? Different worlds we all inhabit from the womb.

War had always seemed to me to be a purely human behavior. Accounts of warlike behavior date back to the very first written records of human history it seemed to be an almost universal characteristic of human groups.

Nothing like being with people you've known almost your entire life. Having a shared history is something you just can't create with the new ones. No matter how much you like that, it just isn't the same.

She could never be part of so much of his turbulent history, his youthful adventure, where life had been deeply felt.

The harvest was a wild living thing that you were trying to tame while all the while it was dragging you behind, arms out, flailing, in the chase. But here was the miracle: Despite the chaos, the lack of planning, the bad feeling between Sherwood and my father, there was also an overriding unity of purpose, a reverence for the family history, a love for the soil within the property lines.

Old age equalizes- we are aware that what is happening to us has happened to untold numbers from the beginning of time. When we are young we act as if we were the first young people in the world.

We are all the product of our past and have to live with our memories and personality they cannot be erased.

A soldier's body is a work of art that contains his country's history.

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago - the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider.... It doesn't seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we've traveled.

My mother lived in Holland, and during World War II was incarcerated in a Japanese camp for three years.

One of the most effective ways in which dominant groups maintain their power is by depriving the people they dominate of the knowledge of their own history. Lacking an appreciation of their own historical experience and the dignity, even glory, of the actions of their own people, the colonized are encouraged to think that they have no alternative to oppressive conditions.