Quotes About History

The Young Tradition (1966) and its successor, So Cheerfully Round (1967), both released on Transatlantic, are rustic tapestries of ballads, carols and street cries from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a parade of serving-maids, poachers, fishermen, cunning foxes, bold dragoons, pretty ploughboys and hungry children.

The Watersons, Frost and Fire (1965); The Young Tradition, So Cheerfully Round (1967); Peter Bellamy, Merlin's Isle of Gramarye (1972).

Shortly afterwards, at Cambridge, he noticed a medieval crumhorn hanging on the wall at a friend's digs and began to seek out – and teach himself to play – examples of every type of instrument that time had consigned to oblivion: crumhorns, sackbuts, sorduns, shawms, rebecs, tabors, viols, citole, organetto, racketts and chalumeaux, and all the senior and junior members of the recorder family.

John Renbourn, Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & Ye Grene Knyghte (1968); Shirley Collins, The Power of the True Love Knot (1968); Shirley and Dolly Collins, Anthems in Eden (1969). The Early Music movement as we know it today began in practice

the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, a liberal immigration bill, some seventy different education bills—they're all passed during the 1960s by President Lyndon Johnson.

It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

He talked a lot about girls, too. His brother, Sam Houston Johnson, recalls that more than once, when he visited his brother at San Marcos, Lyndon, coming back into the room naked after a shower, would take his penis in his hand, and say: "Well, I've gotta take ol' Jumbo here and give him some exercise. I wonder who I'll fuck tonight.

Robert A. Caro

We of the South

I would rather link my name indelibly with the living pulsing history of my country and not be forgotten entirely after a while than to have anything else on earth

Anyone who held that belief, as Richard Rovere was to explain in The New Yorker, "forgot the wisdom of history, which is that members of the United States Senate almost invariably come to grief when they try to win Presidential nominations for themselves or to manipulate national conventions for any purpose whatsoever. For many reasons—patronage is one, and control of delegations is another—the big men at conventions are governors and municipal leaders.

And, in fact, had Johnson's plan succeeded, in many ways it would indeed have been "just the way it was.

Robert A. Caro

I'VE BEEN ENCOUNTERING questions of race, of segregation—of America's great crime—all my professional life.

The breath of life of the Senate is, of course, continuity

People are always asking me why I chose Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson to write about. Well, I must say I never thought of my books as the stories of Moses or Johnson. I never had the slightest interest in writing the life of a great man. From the very start, I thought of writing biographies as a means of illuminating the times of the men I was writing about and the great forces that molded those times—particularly the force that is political power.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. Logic proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

History has the relation to truth that theology has to religion — ie., none to speak of

The country and culture commonly known as America had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.

Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms.

A generation which ignores history has no past—and no future.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded—here and there, now and then—are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.