Quotes About History

The Enlightenment needs more shadow; the Romantic Movement less.

I love Paris for the million reasons that everybody loves the city. It's an incredibly romantic and beautiful place.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

One of the sad things, I think, about the younger generation, quite frankly, is they have less sense of yesterday. And if you don't know who you were, you don't really know who you are.

Despite recent sad developments, cricket will survive and remain our most noble game and I shall always remain proud of the part I played in its history and development.

No day shall erase you from the memory of time

Not only will America go to your country and kill all your people. But they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.

Had there been no Renaissance and no Italian influence to bring in the stories of other lands English history would, it may be, have become as important to the English imagination as the Greek Myths to the Greek imagination; and many plays by many poets would have woven it into a single story whose contours, vast as those of Greek myth, would have made living men and women seem like swallows building their nests under the architrave of some Temple of the Giants.

As the years go by, my life keeps filling up with names like abandoned cemeteries or like an empty history class or a telephone book in a foreign city. And death is when someone behind you keeps calling and calling and you no longer turn around to see who.

Even my loves are measured by wars. I say, "That happened after the Second World War." "We met a day before the Six Day War." I would never say "before the peace of '45-'48" or "in the middle of the peace of '56-'67." Yet the knowledge of peace makes its way from one place to another like children's games, which are so much alike everywhere you go.

Jerusalem, the only city in the world where the right to vote is granted even to the dead.

Sono il profeta di ciò che è stato, io leggo il passato nel palmo della mano della donna che amo, prevedo le piogge invernali già cadute, sono un esperto della neve dell'anno scorso, richiamo dagli inferi le cose che sono state, vaticino ieri e ier l'altro. Sono il profeta di ciò che è stato

The horror of the Holocaust is not that it deviated from human norms; the horror is that it didn't. What happened may happen again, to others not necessarily Jews, perpetrated by others, not necessarily Germans. We are all possible victims, possible perpetrators, possible bystanders.

Kabbalah profoundly influenced the greatest thinkers of history, including Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed, Pythagoras, Plato, Newton, Leibniz, Shakespeare, and Jung.

But history is that rare woman who doesn't like to look at herself in the mirror. History, when she finds herself in front of one, wipes and wipes its surface at though in this way she might change her face to something better

Man ceased to be an ape, vanquished the ape, on the day the first book was written.

The elections themselves have rather a symbolic meaning. They remind us that we are a united, powerful organism of millions of cells, that—to use the language of the "gospel" of the ancients—we are a united church. The history of the United State knows not a single case in which upon this solemn day even a solitary voice has dared to violate the magnificent unison. They

Bygone troubles are good to tell.

Bygone troubles are a pleasure to talk about.

When a people does not honour its past, it lives in a present of little substance and faces a future clouded in doubt.

Our masters say that real arts never die. Real arts are about remembrance.

what is revolution except a systematic way for one species to eat another alive? Let me tell you—history is, unlike what they say on the loudspeakers, not driven by revolutionary force but by people's desire to climb up onto someone else's neck and shit and pee as he or she wants. Enough bad things are done by men already, but if you add women to the equation, one might as well wish not to bring a baby into this world.

I grew up with the dread of seeing piles of old newspapers collect dust and used matches put back into matchboxes. But more than that, I dreaded the memories that were not mine, yet were so adamant to be heard and remembered as the only memories that mattered.

This is like deja vu all over again.