Quotes About History

It turned out that the Germans' modest and conscientious reforms were only a starting point for more rapacious regimes to come.

The people who have really made history are the martyrs.

I don't know about birds nor do I know the history of fire. But I believe that my solitude should have wings

Yo no sé de pájaros, no conozco la historia del fuego. Pero creo que mi soledad debería tener alas.

It's a very powerful neurosis—to not know where one came from and not love what one was. The family tree is what one was. It's important to recognize it head-on and love it.

A grandes voces despertaron a los araucanos.

El agua de Venecia esconde ya demasiada oscuridad y en el limo de la laguna no hay espacio para más. Venecia se levanta sobre los secretos y errores de los que quisieron venir aquí a olvidar y la ciudad se hunde sobre ellos.

I asked myself whether, in bygone days, men had longed for bygone days as I, this summer morning, longed for certain ways of life that man had lost forever.

If there are more dead than living, then the world is about death, and the question is: What are we to do with all the death? Who is going to remember all the dead?

You have to be taught to recognize and care about differences, you have to be instructed who you really are; you have to learn how generations of dead people and their incomprehensible accomplishments made you the way you are; you have to define your loyalty to an abstraction-based herd that transcends your individuality.

History: the first time a joke, the second time a badly translated joke.

Only the past matters, because it is the only thing that outlives everything and everyone.

You can experience and understand history only when you're inside it, but when you're inside it you don't have time or gumption for understanding. All you want is just to stay alive, for which understanding is not necessary. You have no access to history's complex, catastrophic logic, which is indelibly overwhelming and incomprehensible, particularly as you're trying to survive.

We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past.

And we want to develop our strategy to partnership and friendship with the United States, which is connected with a very rich history but what is very important for our future.

It would have been difficult to design a path out of communism worse than the one that has been followed.

La storia è costretta a indovinare. Fortuna che c'è avvezza.

Ma cos'è la storia senza la politica? Una guida che cammina, cammina, con nessuno dietro che impari la strada, e per conseguenza butta via i suoi passi; come la politica senza la storia è uno che cammina senza guida.

Ma cos'è mai la storia, diceva spesso don Ferrante, senza la politica? Una guida che cammina, cammina, con nessuno dietro che impari la strada, e per conseguenza butta via i suoi passi; come la politica senza la storia è uno che cammina senza guida.

The inter- view is about the past—like all other historical sources, it provides us with factual information that can be verified and critically scrutinized—but is of the present...These are living voices, voices that speak with us now

The interview, then, is a historical and social event ... In the interview, we are the coauthors, the cocreators of a document that, to some extent, is about us as well as about the persons we interview.

Somethings were meant to be and somethings were just meant to be good stories

Ours is the "land of the free"—nobody denies that—nobody challenges it. (Maybe it is because we won't let other people testify.) —Roughing It, 1872, ch. 54 (commenting on mistreatment of Chinese in the West)

A bumptious, outgoing soul, Tillotson would later earn a footnote in literary history as the doctor whose electroshock therapy so traumatized Smith College junior Sylvia Plath that she attempted suicide shortly thereafter.