Quotes About History

If you inquire into the history of the metropolitan area in which you live, you will probably find ample evidence of how the federal, state, and local governments unconstitutionally used housing policy to create or reinforce segregation in ways that still survive.

As American citizens, whatever routes we or our particular ancestors took to get to this point, we're all in this together now. Over the past few decades, we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens.

If young people are not taught an accurate account of how we came to be segregated, their generation will have little chance of doing a better job of desegregating than the previous ones.

until the last quarter of the twentieth century, racially explicit policies of federal, state, and local governments defined where whites and African Americans should live.

The existence of black ghettos is a visible reminder of our inequalities and history, a reminder whose implications are so uncomfortable that we find ways to avoid them.

Richard Rothstein

United States History: Reconstruction to the Present, a 2016 textbook issued by the educational publishing giant Pearson, offers a similar account. It celebrates the FHA's and VA's support of single-family developments and gives Levittown as an example of suburbanization without disclosing that African Americans were excluded. It boasts of the PWA's bridge, dam, power plant, and government building projects but omits describing its insistence on segregated housing.

With very rare exceptions, textbook after textbook adopts the same mythology. If middle and high school students are being taught a false history, is it any wonder that they come to believe that African Americans are segregated only because they don't want to marry or because they prefer to live only among themselves? Is it any wonder that they grow up inclined to think that programs to ameliorate ghetto conditions are simply undeserved handouts?

Counting both Northerners and Southerners, more American lives were lost in the Civil War than in any other conflict.

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don't have that kind of time.

I know history. There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

Oh we're a mess, poor humans, poor flesh—hybrids of angels and animals, dolls with diamonds stuffed inside them. We've been to the moon and we're still fighting over Jerusalem.

There are many names in history but none of them are ours.

History throws its shadow over the beginning

The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell.

The present is a bully, always making us think the molten moment we inhabit is the most alarming ever, while the past tends to slip into that specious category of "simpler times.

Value your freedom or you will lose it, teaches history. 'Don't bother us with politics', respond those who don't want to learn.

King Alexander, the son of Ammon and of Philip the king, also supreme king of Europe and all Asia, Egypt and Libya, to the Tyrians who are as nothing.

While the physical scientists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century asked, "Where are we?" in the universe; and the social scientists of the nineteenth century inquired, "Who are we?" in our relationship to nature and the unconscious; we're now at a time of history when the question is "How are we?" in our interconnectedness and interdependence with life. I

Try to see the past as a room separate from the one you live in now. You can go in there, but you don't live there anymore.

Churchill thought that it was 'Crazy' to give universal suffrage to 'these naked savages'. Lyttelton hoped to 'retard' constitutional development in Nigeria and cited the principle of 'divide et impera'.

At its zenith, around 500 million people, or about a quarter of the world's population, were British subjects.

Much had happened to Churchill in the interval between these two speeches. In January 1895 his father, Lord Randolph Churchill, died at the age of forty-five from a degenerative illness, possibly syphilis,

Oliver Cromwell's words in dismissal of the Long Parliament: 'You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.