Quotes About History

From the very beginning of time itself, enemies have become friends, and friends have become lovers. It is not beyond the realm of possibility, even if history and experiences might be against it. Against us.

And that's maybe a better description of the experience of reading the Federalist Papers now, if you're reading them for guidance through a modern crisis. The predictions of the Framers of the Constitution were accurate for a time, but history diverged from their path a while back.

Most Americans don't know that military coups swept over half the country, with the acquiescence of the federal government. But that is what happened. The legitimate governments of southern states and cities were overthrown by force, by white supremacist paramilitary organizations. Black people and Republicans were disenfranchised and massacred. They call it the Redemption of the South, and what it means is we turn away from the idea of equality.

Regie Gibson said, "Our problem as Americans is we actually hate history. . . . What we love is nostalgia. We love to remember things exactly the way they didn't happen. History itself is often an indictment. And people? We hate to be indicted.

Just because your people have lived here for a long time doesn't make it yours. Do you have a deed?

But in an age of intelligence, when the keys of science have unlocked the sacred shrines and hallowed vaults of sacerdotal mysteries, and modern researches of history have laid bare the fact that most ancient religious countries abound in reports of this character, a profound and general skepticism must be the result, and a total rejection of their truth by all men of science and historic intelligence.

For one thing, they did not call themselves Pilgrims (that term was not widely used until about 1840). Nor were they fleeing immediate persecution.

So you can remember everything about your life from the last seven years, but nothing before that? Not now, Carl. There must be something, Carl said, undeterred. I remember fighting the Romans at Masada, he said seriously. He didn't have to see Carl's face to recognise the shock that was there. That was seventy-three A.D ... ? Van Helsing shrugged. You asked.

Religion fared badly in so much of the history he wrote about, and yet he was constantly surprised by how much solace he gained from places of worship. It wasn't redemptive, nothing to do with conscience—more the strange sense of meaningful emptiness he found in these places, a quality that allowed him to disappear effortlessly. The

Atop a Ferris wheel, Orson Welles told Joseph Cotten how Italy's thirty years of war and terror and bloodshed had produced the Renaissance and Michelangelo, and how Switzerland's five hundred years of democracy and peace had produced, goddamn, only the cuckoo clock.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you.

Never mind that to me, the face of Afghanistan is that of a boy with a thin-boned frame, a shaved head, and low-set ears, a boy with a Chinese doll face perpetually lit by a harelipped smile. Never mind any of those things. Because history isn't easy to overcome. Neither is religion. In the end, I was a Pashtun and he was a Hazara, I was Sunni and he was Shi'a, and nothing was ever going to change that. Nothing.

You are lucky. How so? To know where you came from. I guess I never gave it much thought.: Bah, of course not. But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle. Vous comprenez? Like you missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

Take two Afghans who've never met, put them in a room for ten minutes, and they'll figure out how they're related.

c'est une erreur d'affirmer qu'on peut enterrer le passé, il s'accroche tant et si bien qu'il remonte toujours à la surface.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle.

El niño hindú aprendería muy pronto lo que los británicos descubrieron a principios de siglo y los rusos a finales de la década de los ochenta: que los afganos son un pueblo independiente.

The poems of Khalili, Pajwak, Ansari, Haji Dehqan, Ashraqi, Beytaab, Hafez, Jami, Nizami, Rumi, Khayyám, Beydel, and more went up in smoke.

Tak usah pedulikan semua itu. Karena sejarah tak akan mudah disangkal. Begitu pula agama. Pada akhirnya aku adalah seorang Pashtun dan dia seorang Hazara, aku seorang Sunni dan dia seorang Syi'ah, dan tidak ada yang bisa mengubahnya. Tidak ada.

En ce jour où, pendant qu'ils regardaient un vieux film, Lemar lui a demandé s'il était déjà né quand le monde était en noir et blanc.

But it is important to know this, to know your roots. To know where you started as a person. If not, your own life seems unreal to you. Like a puzzle…Like you have missed the beginning of a story and now you are in the middle of it, trying to understand.

But Laila knew that her future was no match for her brothers' past. They had overshadowed her in life. They would obliterate her in death. Mammy was now the curator of their lives' museum and she, Laila, a mere visitor. A receptacle for their myths. The parchment on which Mammy meant to ink their legends.