Quotes About History

L'Histoire vraie peut être dangereuse pour certains intérêts politiques, et on est en droit de se demander si ce n'est pas pour cette raison que certaines méthodes, en ce domaine, sont imposées officiellement à l'exclusion de toutes les autres: consciemment ou non, on écarte a priori tout ce qui permettrait de voir clair en bien des choses, et c'est ainsi que se forme l'"opinion publique".

An altogether extraordinary fact is the rapidity with which Medieval civilization was completely forgotten; already in the seventeenth century, men had lost all idea of what it had been, and its surviving monuments no longer had any meaning for them, either intellectually or even esthetically;

Indeed the study of the Easy as we know it today, if undertaken in a really direct way, would be of great assistance towards the understanding of all Antiquity, on account of that very quality of fixity and stability.

It is always self-defeating to pretend to a generation younger than your own it simply erases your own experience in history.

The first form of Negationism about the second world war and the gas chambers concerns a very few people in caves, contrary to that, mass negationism is negationism which concerns absolutely everybody and everyone, all the political parties, all information, all the medias and all the people, what is happening obviously is denial and if you say that it happens, you are taken to court, fighting negationism today takes you to court.

Il n'est pas très courant de voir un peuple durement opprimé accourir, tout juste libéré, chez son oppresseur, pour demeurer sous son administration ; il faut croire que la France, en fait, n'avait pas laissé sur l'autre rive de la Méditerranée un trop mauvais souvenir pour que ses ex-assujettis n'aient rien eu de plus pressé, à peine sa tutelle écartée, que de se précipiter sur son sol. Ou bien venaient-ils en conquérants ?

People had a drive to immortalize their past, even the evil stuff, like Abu Ghraib or the Holocaust. They liked to take pictures, keep journals, because they believed in what they were doing. No one, Naomi had learned, did evil without believing it was right at the time. Maybe this was why it was nearly impossible to talk them out of it?

Sexual abuse is also a secret crime, one that usually has no witness. Shame and secrecy keep a child from talking to siblings about the abuse, even if all the children in a family are being sexually assaulted. In contrast, if a child is physically or emotionally abused, the abuse is likely to occur in front of the other children in the family, at least some of the time. The physical and emotional abuse becomes part of the family's explicit history. Sexual abuse does not.

Hayden] white argues instead for histories that avoid narrative closure and that highlight the contingency of the past ... He points especially to chronicle - a form marked by a lack of closure - as a useful alternative to the narrative. In a chronicle, historians offer an interpretation of the past but simply end the account when they reach the present.

The route had been renamed after the war, Sergeant Booth had told them in the taxi. Now it was known as the Road of Remembrance. To Billy, recalling Alf Dawkins with his crutches and his nervous tick, begging for half-crowns, it seemed more a case of how quickly people forgot.

History that is presented only as ink-embalmed data is as a flower pressed in a book. Although the dry petals still hold all the elements of the original flower, they cannot show us how it looked blooming in the field. The color and fragrance - the true reality - or the flowers are gone.

I think it's wrong that so many people pass on from this existence, and take all their knowledge with them.

I gathered that with the men the consensus was that women were okay in their place, which I guess was the way cavemen felt about it, and all their male descendants. The question was, and still is, what's their place?

Old Time is never discreet or tactful.

We crave nothing less that the perfect story; And while we chatter or listen all our lives to a din of craving – jokes, anecdotes, novels, dreams, films, plays, songs, half the words of our days – We are satisfied only by the one short tale we feel to be true; History is the will of a just God who knows us.

Women then very seldom wore watches. They did their chores till the chores were finished or they fell over dead, whichever came first.

In fact, we have no firm notion of how it felt to exist in Rome, Palestine, or Asia Minor some two thousand years ago--burdened with all the assumptions and hopes of our past lives; then confronted in words by the flaming demands of a recently dead, maybe resurrected Jew named Jesus with a ravenous will to change us and the Earth.

Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.

My work as a whole is about excavating and shining a light on pieces of history that not only need to be seen and heard, but that can also add to the conversation about what's going on now.

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument.

It was so much easier to knock down than build up: a city raised over millennia could be razed in a day; the life of a man ended in a second's crack. In years to come, Edmund and his children would know the names of planes and tanks and battles and invasions and recall with facility the atrocities of the age, the names of those who committed them. But would any of them be able to name a single repairer of the breach or fixer of broken walls?

Every possibility already exists. All knowledge, all discoveries, and all inventions of the future, are in the Universal Mind as possibilities, waiting for the human mind to draw them forth. Every creation and invention in history has also been drawn from the Universal Mind, whether the person consciously knew that or not.

5,000–3,000 BC)

Gratitude was a fundamental part of the teachings of all the great avatars throughout history. In the book that changed my life, The Science of Getting Rich, written by Wallace Wattles in 1910, gratitude is its longest chapter. Every teacher featured in The Secret uses gratitude as part of his or her day. Most of them begin their day with thoughts and feelings of gratitude.