Quotes About History

it's wrong what they say about the past, I've learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out.

Time makes us forget.

I asked my soul: What is Delhi? She replied: The world is the body and Delhi its life. Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib

The prophet is one of the most controversial and misunderstood figures of all time.

They can learn- they must learn- to appreciate the history of their good fortune through the experiences of those who not only witnessed history, but made it.

Screened bottom boards were used by beekeepers more than 150 years ago for improved ventilation. Beekeepers replaced them with solid bottom boards in the winter, and over time the expense of having two pieces of equipment fell into disfavor, and the screens went away.)

Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.

Oh, Trent and I go back a long way," I said lightly, twirling a curl of my hair about my finger and remembering its new shortness. "We met at camp as children. Sort of romantic when you think about it." I smiled at Trent's suddenly blank look.

We don't forget, Rachel, and it's not as if it was our ancestors who were betrayed. It was us.

Travel this country and you move through more than geography; you move through time.

History shows that socialism first triumphed in relatively backwards countries, not in the countries where capitalism had developed.

History is a wave that moves through time slightly faster than we do.

no one knows why things happen, you see? Anything could follow from anything. Even real history tells us nothing.

It makes us a thread in a tapestry that has unrolled for centuries before us, and will unroll for centuries after us. We're midway through the loom, that's the present, and what we do casts the thread in a particular direction, and the picture of the tapestry changes accordingly. When we begin to to try to make a picture pleasing to us and to those who come after, then perhaps you can say that we have seized history.

Sad but true: individual intelligence probably peaked in the Upper Paleolithic, and we have been self-domesticated creatures ever since

All the great moments of history have taken place inside people's heads.

Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.

Must redefine utopia. It isn't the perfect end-product of our wishes, define it so and it deserves the scorn of those who sneer when they hear the word. No. Utopia is the process of making a better world, the name for one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, agonizing process, with no end. Struggle forever. Compare it to the present course of history. If you can.

The one who tells the stories rules the world.

Because history is the soap opera that hurts, the kabuki with real knives.

we all began female, and always had both sexual hormones in us. We always had masculine and feminine behavioral traits, which we had to train into gender-appropriate behaviors, even though they were traits that everyone has. We selectively encouraged or repressed traits, so for most of our history we have reinforced gender. But in our deepest selves we were always both.

It would take 2,000 Vietnam Memorials to list the [Twentieth] century's war dead.

what has mattered are the moments of exposure to every life, when habit is no longer enough, and choices have to be made. That's when everyone becomes a great man, for a moment; and the choices made in those moments, which come all too frequently, then combine to make history.

It's fragile what we know. It's gone every time we forget. Then someone has to learn it all over again.