Quotes About History

The past is never where you think you left it.

The infamous "Rape of Nanking" that occurred not long afterward, just 102 miles farther north, tells a story of what might have happened at my childhood home were it not for that commander.

This story is about John, who was a private in the 2nd Georgia Battalion Infantry. I had always been told that John had taken part in Pickett's Charge, the bloody assault on Cemetery Ridge on July 3, 1863. Actually he was mortally wounded very close to Cemetery Hill on July 2 the day before that tragic charge.

all my ancestors were from the South and some even fought and died for the losing side. Perhaps that's why I was long resigned to my failure to publish.

As I turn and walk toward Murray Hill and home and purring Phoebe, I suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

The name of the exhibit that my body is in, here with good ol' Sergeant Stubby, is The Price of Freedom.

we'd been uptown at the Museum of Natural History at the time, safe beneath the blue whale hanging by its dorsal fin, unarmed and pacific, silent as ever, a sentinel in the lurid tabloid nightmare this city's been dreaming.

suspect that we do not know any more than the people of the past did, but only think somewhat differently.

We came when a lot of other Asian people came, after the law changed." "I remember that," I say. And I do, more or less. I remember Kennedy talking about the need for it—calling the old system of racist quotas intolerable—though it was Johnson who finally signed it.

I died when I was little more than two years old, on June 13, 1919, there in the Signal Corps lofts at Camp Vail, New Jersey. One week after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, which would eventually recognize the right of women to vote. Pigeons do not vote, but as a female being I felt a degree of investment in the fortunes of other females.

Munson was a member of the unit to which Corporal Gault assigned me after I flew my tenth mission back home to Rampont, a unit that would soon be known throughout the world as part of the Lost Battalion. That summer it was still simply the 1st Battalion of the 308th Regiment of the United States Army's 77th Infantry Division, under the command of newly minted Major Charles White Whittlesey.

There's no more education, no more culture - if culture depends on a commonly understood history - and perhaps no more middle class in the United States. There's War.

Give that bully that is history a bleeding lip.

In Paris, I felt connected to history in a way I did not in America. Elderly men I passed in the Latin Quarter, with empty sleeves pinned to the shoulder of their jackets, reminded me of the not-so-distant war.

An Arundel Tomb"

We should never, ever believe life - or history holds no surprises for us. That was lies arrogance. And arrogance can blind us to the truth. Which truth? Any truth. All truth. her voice was solemn

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable," wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. "If

I was one of many who owed their lives to the black circles and squares in Schou's family tree.

the usual limits of understanding another's mind are compounded when trying to understand Lowell, a man who thought in metaphor, lived in history, and whose mind was engaged in a restless, stupendously elaborate game of three-dimensional chess. Lowell's mind was of a lurching, revising originality.

Who knows what will come when quick-tongued men make ancient grievances rhyme with fresh desire for land and conquest?

Some of you will have fine monuments by which the living may remember the evil done to you. Some of you will have only crude wooden crosses or painted rocks, while yet others of you must remain hidden in the shadows of history.

And one has a right, perhaps, to feel a satisfaction those content to serve mediocre employers will never know – the satisfaction of being able to say with some reason that one's efforts, in however modest a way, comprise a contribution to the course of history.

A land of fences is so temporary. You can change things as easily as a stage set. I used to act, you know. Sometimes in decent theaters. Wretched theaters too. Fences, what are they? Stage design. That's the nice thing about England. Hedges give a sense of history properly set down in the land.

those content to serve mediocre employers will never know – the satisfaction of being able to say with some reason that one's efforts, in however modest a way, comprise a contribution to the course of history.