Quotes About History

In college, what had always stuck with him in Astronomy 101 was that the first astronomers to think of points of light not as part of a celestial tapestry revolving around the earth but as individual planets had had to wrench their imaginations--and thus their analogies and metaphors--out of a grooved track that had been running through everyone's minds for hundreds and hundreds of years.

Names belonged to where we had come from, not to who we were...

I am sure of the here and now, this moment, and the next. I am sure of my past." That was ghost bird's castle keep, and it was inviolate.

The impatient, feckless reader, posessed of no glimmer of intellectual or historical curiosity, should do an old historian a favor and skip the next few pages, proceeding directly to the Silence itself (Part III). I would assume that, in these horrid modern times, that will include most of you. Of course, those readers least likely to read these footnotes, and thus least likely to appreciate the next few pages, will skip this note and bore themselves upon the ennui of history .

But when you've lived in a place this long, no walk can occur solely in the present. Every street, every building, appears to you encrusted with memories, with perspectives that betray your age, your cynicism, your sentimentality, or your lack of feeling where you should feel something.

art is question without answer; religion is question and answer, where the answer cannot be explained but only repeated; science is question and answer, where the answer can be explained in other terms but is abstract, universal and does not deal with particulars; and history is question and answer, where the answer is concrete and particular, but where the totality of answers about particulars can never be assembled.

Thomas Jefferson

The humans were protecting their heritage, or so they thought. Strange that Mud Men seem more concerned about the past than the present.

Whales and dolphins have been aquatic for about 70 million years and seals for between 25 and 30 million years.

En aquel entonces también las palabras me parecieron de piedra, solo que de piedra fluida y cristalina. La piedra se solidificaba al terminar cada palabra, para quedar escrita para siempre en el tiempo. ¿No eran así las palabras de tus mayores?

Cada seis años la Patria cambia de apellido

esto pasa desde que yo tengo memoria.

No podía dormir: había presencias extrañas en torno a su casa, como si un maleficio lanzado contra él y su familia desde hacía muchos siglos hubiera empezado a tomar forma aquella noche.

los hombres que pasen por aquí no tengan ni memoria de que fui Ixtepec.

History is written by the last fellow at the typewriter.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.

Contudo, o sentimento em relação às terras distantes permanece, e o interesse por elas jamais arrefece. Assim, o homem cavouca, insaciável, em épocas passadas e em culturas desconhecidas. A rigidez da própria existência aumenta, e essas épocas e culturas oferecem o instrumento inesgotável para a transformação.

Do?i ?e vreme kad ?e ljudi svoja ?ula prekovati u se?anje, a sve vreme u prošlost. Do?i ?e vreme kad ?e jedna jedina prošlost obuhvatiti sve ljude, kad ne?e biti ništa osim te prošlosti, kad ?e svako verovati: u prošlost.

I told him that I did not believe that they could burn people in our age, that humanity would never tolerate it…

I don't want my past to become anyone else's future.

I am not so naïve as to believe that this slim volume will change the course of history or shake the conscience of the world. Books no longer have the power they once did. Those who kept silent yesterday will remain silent tomorrow.

We cannot indefinitely avoid depressing subject matter, particularly it it is true, and in the subsequent quarter century the world has had to hear a story it would have preferred not to hear - the story of how a cultured people turned to genocide, and how the rest of the world, also composed of cultured people, remained silent in the face of genocide. (v)

Everybody around us was weeping. Someone began to recite Kaddish, the prayer for the dead. I don't know whether, during the history of the Jewish people, men have ever before recited Kaddish for themselves.

The world? The world is not interested in us. Today, everything is possible, even the crematoria...