Quotes About History

Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.

We see today on the streets in big cities in America defacing all monuments, defacing American history, disregard for American history, you disregard your past, you basically forsake your future because the only responsible way to confront the future, to advance in the future is by relying on, by studying your past, and American past and core element has been Judeo-Christian values.

The antonym of "forgetting" is not "remembering", but justice .

M]y terror of forgetting is greater than my terror of having too much to remember. Let the accumulated facts about the past continue to multiply. ... So that those who need can find that this person did live, those events really took place, this interpretation is not the only one.

The pleasantest of all diversions is to sit alone under the lamp, a book spread out before you, and to make friends with people of a distant past you have never known.

It does happen, of course, that the priesthood has been on bad terms with womankind for some three thousand years. You see, Buddhism teaches that women are evil. Fiends. Messengers of hell. I've spent years immersed in the scriptures, so it's no accident that you and I fight all the time.

I recently came across this anonymous message on Facebook: "The rebirth of Israel didn't occur because of the Holocaust. The Holocaust occurred because there was no Israel.

in Israel no trauma was ever really forgotten, only displaced by new trauma so that the country's emotional life resembled one of its archaeological sites, an accumulation of disrupted layers.

Sometimes, in political arguments with Palestinians, I would be told: Why are we arguing about who owns the land, when in the end the land will own us both?

The notion of a people chosen by God wasn't intended to bestow privilege but responsibility. Jewish history attests that this role carries more burden than glory. The classical way Jews understood their own history was as the story of a people failing to live in the intensity of God's presence. This is the story told by the Hebrew Bible -- a national epic astonishing in its relentless criticism of the people it is supposedly intended to celebrate.

You see some classes of the human family that are black, uncouth, uncomely, disagreeable and low in their habits, wild, and seemingly deprived of nearly all the blessings of the intelligence that is generally bestowed upon mankind.... Cain slew his brother. Cain might have been killed, and that would have put a termination to that line of human beings. This was not to be, and the Lord put a mark upon him, which is the flat nose and black skin.

We were fishers of memory waiting on the banks of time and waiting for the past to swallow the date.

Why, when discussing China today, do I always return to the Cultural Revolution? That's because these two eras are so interrelated: even though the state of society now is very different from then, some psychological elements remain strikingly similar. After participating in one mass movement during the Cultural Revolution, for example, we are now engaged in another: economic development.

As soon as the train pulled into the station, the red guards would pour out of doors and windows like toothpaste squirting endlessly from a tube.

History knew the truth. History was the most inhuman product of humanity. It scooped up the whole of human will and, like the goddess Kali in Calcutta, dripped blood from its mouth as it bit and crunched.

History is a record of destruction. One must always make room for the next ephemeral crystal. For history, to build and to destroy are one and the same thing.

Honda did not necessarily cling to the historical school of law, which was influenced by nineteenth-century romanticism, nor to the ethnic school. The Japan of the Meiji era, indeed, needed a nationalistic type of law, one that had its roots in the philosophy of the historical school. But Honda's concerns were quite different. He had first been intent on isolating the essential principle behind all law, a principle which he felt must exist.

Time is what matters. As time goes by, you and I will be carried inexorably into the mainstream of our period, even though we're unaware of what it is. And later, when they say that young men in the early Taisho era thought, dressed, talked, in such and such a way, they'll be talking about you and me. We'll all be lumped together…. In a few decades, people will see you and the people you despise as one and the same, a single entity.

Throughout history, works of art have been stolen under mysterious circumstances...Said by some to be the work of "Phantom" thieves... ...Others dismiss it as mere myth. But in this country, the stories are all too true. The name of this mysterious thief? "Dark." And his true identity? No one knows...

Unless we know ourselves and our history, and other people and their history, there is really no way that we can really have positive kinds of interaction where there is real understanding.

The lack of insight to reality, life and history as well as into God's ways, or sunan in His creation, some people will continue to seek or demand the impossible. They will imagine what does not or cannot happen, misunderstand occurrences and events, and interpret them on the basis of cherished illusions which in no way reflect God's sunan or the essence of Islamic law.

China is the greatest mystifying and stupefying fact in the modern world.

As for international understanding, I feel that macaroni has done more for our appreciation of Italy than Mussolini.

Once [China] had a destiny. Once she was a conqueror. Now her greatest destiny seems to be merely to exist, to survive.