Quotes About History

I have never seen to my knowledge a man, woman, or child who was in favor of producing a perfect equality, social and political, between negroes and white men.

There is another old poet whose name I do not now remember who said, 'Truth is the daughter of Time.'

The assertion that 'all men are created equal' was of no practical use in effecting our separation from Great Britain and it was placed in the Declaration not for that, but for future use.

On the first day of January in the year of our Lord, one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any state, or designated part of a state, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.

her unhandsome, but beautiful friend of so many years...

to think that before Pasteur's discovery of microbes, doctors fought duels over the merits of balsam of Peru versus tar oil for wound infection. Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion. Still, each generation of physicians imagined that ignorance was the special provenance of their elders.

vaccine for polio had been developed

The bloodlines from the Mayflower hadn't trickled down to this zip code.

He leaned about the same way in falling towards Jacqueline, forward, down towards the bottom of the car.

Perhaps history had dwindled away. Their lives, Lydia's and Silas's, the whole country's, had become ordinary things. Not worth recording any longer, not worth the few precious moments of her busy day.

In a few decades, the Indigenous population in Cuba declined by perhaps as much as 95 percent.

The first recorded voyage to Havana occurred in 1572. Others followed, and by the first decade of the seventeenth century, Africans would represent almost half of Havana's population.16

Today in Cuba, a small number of people proudly claim Taíno identity.

Plantations kept growing in number and size, taking over more land and more forests, and consuming more and more African lives. What had been a society with slaves became instead a slave society, one in which the system of slavery left its mark on everything from political to social to economic to cultural life. In the process, the island of Cuba became not only a colony "equal in value to a Kingdom," but also, increasingly, the apple of the eye of a young United States.

Given the character, the mentality, the history of the people of the United States, Roosevelt actually did some wonderful things, and some of his countrymen have never forgiven him for doing them.

But two facts are clear: it is impossible to understand the Cuban Revolution without understanding Miami, and it is impossible to understand Miami without understanding the Cuban Revolution.

DESPITE THE INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING OF the American Revolution's overtures to the Spanish-speaking world, Spain—the New World's oldest colonial power—opted to support the hemisphere's first anticolonial movement.

In the late 1850s, one Florida senator reported that US ships sailing to Angola could buy Africans for about $70 and then sell them in Cuba for almost $1,200.

By 1530, the Indigenous population of Hispaniola had declined by about 96 percent.

When the friar answered that the good ones did, Hatuey at once answered that he preferred hell, "so as not to be where Spaniards were.

There are so many people who've come before us, arrows and wagon wheels, obsidian tools, buffalo. Look out at the meadow, you can almost see them, generations dissolved in the bluegrass and hay. I want to try and be terrific. Even for an hour.

Don't think about Laika in orbit. Don't think about cringe and catastrophe.

In the old pieces of furniture almost as in the old paintings, dwells the charm of the past, of the faded which becomes stronger in a man when he reaches an advanced age.

We forget most of our past but embody all of it.