Quotes About History

Numbers are not impartial and straightforward; they have baggage.

Iraq and all over the Middle East.

Saint-Simon was aware of the role of class struggle in history. Thus he divided contemporary French society into the industriels and the oisifs—those who worked, and the rich parasites who lived off their labor.

George Washington, the first president of the United States, mastered geometry, trigonometry, and surveying at about the age of twelve, though folks in his day did not consider him particularly bright.

Some things you cannot leave behind. Your history will pursue you doggedly across frontiers and over oceans. It will slip past the unsmiling border guards, fold itself invisibly into the pages of your passport, a silent, treacherous stowaway.

change who you are simply by climbing on a boat or boarding a train. Some things you cannot leave behind. Your history will pursue you doggedly across frontiers and over oceans. It will slip past the unsmiling border guards, fold itself invisibly into the pages of your passport, a silent, treacherous stowaway.

My fondest hope is that 'Roots' may start black, white, brown, red, yellow people digging back for their own roots. Man, that would make me feel 90 feet tall.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage- to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning. No matter what our attainments in life, there is still a vacuum, an emptiness, and the most disquieting loneliness.

I was weeping for all of history's incredible atrocities against fellowmen, which seems to be mankind's greatest flaw...

So Dad has joined the others up there. I feel that they do watch and guide, and I also feel that they join me in the hope that this story of our people can help alleviate the legacies of the fact that preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners.

I never graduated from Iowa, but I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's.

He didn't understand women so how could he possibly expect to understand their predecessors.

Although most well-informed people have heard of Wallenberg today, many, including Jews, know less about him than about Oscar Schindler, who saved far fewer people and in any case profited from their forced labor.

Nothing lives forever even the president

Whenever possible, he fought against the idea of collective guilt, even though it was an unpopular stand immediately after the war.

Histories of music since 1900 often take the form of a teleological tale, a goal-obsessed narrative full of great leaps forward and heroic battles with the philistine bourgeoisie. When the concept of progress assumes exaggerated importance, many works are struck from the historical record on the grounds that they have nothing new to say.

To project our own worldview is to refuse to learn what happened, which prevents us comprehending worldviews that differ significantly from our own. If we insist on treating history as a mirror, we shall see only ourselves.

Destruction of war memorials is collective punishment for descendants of the war dead and an attempt at damnatio memoriae. Revenge against history ensures there will be no peaceful future.

After his sisters were taken away, the Japanese occupying force sent my grandfather to Imperial Schools. My first language is Japanese, he tells me. English far away. Sometimes, right after he told me, I would look at him and wonder what it felt like, to have the print of your enemy all the way inside you, right into the way you shaped your thoughts.

In some way I had never known how to express, I'd feared I would have to become the first of my kind, whatever my kind was, should I be allowed to survive—that which history has never seen before.

The pot that had simmered for fifty years boiled over. Colliers and miners, furnacemen and tram-road labourers were flooding down the valley to the Chartists' rendezvous: men from Dowlais under the Guests, Cyfartha under the Crawshays, Nantyglo under Bailey and a thousand forges and bloomeries in the hills: men of the farming Welsh, the Staffordshire specialists and the labouring Irish were taking to arms.

Mr. Watson, come here, I want you.

You have to look at the history of the Middle East in particular. It has been one of failure and frustration, of feudalism and tribalism.