Quotes About History

There is no doubt of one thing: the world of the "worker" is taking shape with dynamic force—with such a velocity that, rightly or wrongly, one is tempted to speak of demonic force in history.

It was the stuff of Alexandre Dumas' novels as it would be of George Sand's; Romanticism had some roots in reality.

And geography blended with time equals destiny.

Since there are no laws that can protect us from ourselves, no criminal code is capable of preventing a true crime against literature; though we can condemn the material suppression of literature¬Ã¢â'¬â€the persecution of writers, acts of censorship, the burning of books—we are powerless when it comes to its worst violation: that of not reading the books. For that crime, a person pays with his whole life; if the offender is a nation, it pays with its history.

It's enough, therefore, to glance in the dictionary and find that katorga (forced labor) is a Turkish word, too. And it's enough to discover on a Turkish map, somewhere in Anatolia, or Ionia, a town called Nigde (russian for nowhere).

If Meditations is antiquity, it is we who are the ruins.

During World War One, our country had used other Indians, Cherokees and Chickasaws, to send messages in their own language to confuse the enemy.

Waiting is something you get used to when you're Native American.

So, when all of our people did not stop raiding, the Americans made war on all of the Navajos. They burned our crops, killed our livestock, and cut down our peach trees. They drove our people into exile. They sent us on the Long Walk.

Everyone called that plane Washing Machine Charlie," Sam said.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history, or science, it is killed.

Mythology, in other words, is psychology misread as biography, history, and cosmology.

How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task.

The rise and fall of civilizations in the long, broad course of history can be seen to have been largely a function of the integrity and cogency of their supporting canons of myth; for not authority but aspiration is the motivator, builder, and transformer of civilization.

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky.

If a being from another world were to ask you, How can I learn what it's like to be human? a good answer would be, Study mythology.

the most evident distinguishing sign is man's organization of his life according primarily to mythic, and only secondarily economic, aims and laws. Food and drink, reproduction and nest-building, it is true, play formidable roles in the lives no less of men than of chimpanzees. But what of the economics of the Pyramids, the cathedrals of the Middle Ages, Hindus starving to death with edible cattle strolling all around them, or the history of Israel, from the time of Saul to right now?

Myth is much more important and true than history.

We can't have a mythology for a long, long time to come. Things are changing too fast to become mythologized.

My Aunty Frisco used to say that a man who has a strong relationship with fire is capable of historical love, because the flames keep the passion flowing in the smaller parts of the soul.

Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well.

THE SANE METHOD OF STUDYING HISTORY consists (or wd. if it were ever practised, consist) in learning what certain great protagonists intended, and to what degree they failed in forcing their program on the mass. For example:…J. Q. Adams' intention of conserving national wealth for purposes of national education and civilization… Jefferson's continual struggle to import civilization from Europe (getting measurements of la Maison Carrée…)

the democratic idea' would not necessarily lead to the idea of 'the great protagonist' either; and further, that 'the great protagonists' in the 1930s would be, not a Jefferson or an Adams, but Mussolini, Stalin, and Hitler.

An early reviewer of Cantos XXXI–XLI in the New York Nation amused himself with the conceit of Mr Pound taking correspondence courses in such subjects as 'History of the U.S. Treasury from the Revolution to the Civil War (from the Original Documents)' and making notes diligently on small pieces of paper which a gust of wind scattered over the hills about Rapallo, and which he then picked up and sent to the printer as he found them.