Quotes About History

I'm a great aficionado of history. I was deeply affected by seeing the disintegration of any chance of democracy coping with fascism in the Weimar republic, where woolly-minded, well-meaning liberalism actually allowed the forces of darkness to use democracy, to exploit democracy, to overturn democracy.

It is a very great mistake, and a very common one, even for well-read persons, to adopt the idea that the progress of the human race in the science of government, in the arts of civilization and refinement, and in the establishment of morality and religion, has been constantly and steadily towards improvement and perfection.

For even the ordinary well-read person, the French Enlightenment is largely restricted to the three big-name philosophes: Diderot, Rousseau, Voltaire.

I think the tradition of well-written history hasn't been squashed out of the academic world as much in Britain as it has in the United States.

I don't look at our society today too much. My focus is still in the past, and part of the reason is because what I do - the wellspring of art, or what I do - l get from the blues. So I listen to the music of a particular period that I'm working on, and I think inside the music is clues to what is happening with the people.

The history of the Welsh, the Irish, the Highlanders, is just the same as that of the Gauls, one of internecine feud, no political cohesion, no capacity for merging private interests, forgetting private grudges for a patriotic cause.

My Welsh grandmother Mair didn't meet my grandfather until she was 28, quite old to be unmarried in the early '40s.

The Welsh have everywhere adopted the Cymric tongue; they hug themselves in the belief that they are pure descendants of the ancient Britons, but in fact, they are rather Silurians than Celts.

Jesus wept; Voltaire smiled. From that divine tear and from that human smile is derived the grace of present civilization.

I've wept for Haiti a thousand times over the years since my first trip during the Duvalier reign.

I watched the night unfold from beginning to end on my own here in my flat in Budapest where I've been working for the last six months, and when it was announced that Barack Obama was indeed president-elect, I wept.

Religion is the organization of spirituality into something that became the hand maiden of conquerors. Nearly all religions were brought to people and imposed on people by conquerors, and used as the framework to control their minds.

Things ain't what they used to be and never were.

Let's teach kids, at the kindergarten level, what the contributions of people of color were to building the United States of America.

Asia is not going to be civilized after the methods of the West. There is too much Asia and she is too old.

If you look at things historically, Kanye West has really represented the battering ram against political correctness.

The medieval Islamic world, from Central Asia to the shores of the Atlantic, was a world where scholars and men of learning flourished. But because we have tended to see Islam as the enemy of the West, as an alien culture, society, and system of belief, we have tended to ignore or erase its great relevance to our own history.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium.

We tend to forget in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than Al Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.

For us in Russia communism is a dead dog. For many people in the West, it is still a living lion.

When 'Midnight's Children' came out, people in the West tended to respond to the fantasy elements in the novel, to praise it in those terms. In India, people read it like a history book.

I don't know about Mario Balotelli saying, 'Why always me?' - England should be saying as a nation, 'Why always us?' You can go back to 1970, when Gordon Banks got food poisoning and we lost to West Germany. Then there was 1986 and Maradona's hand. And last time, Frank Lampard not getting his goal against the Germans.

If the purpose of the wall was to destroy Berlin, Herr Ulbricht and his cohorts have erred sadly. Berlin is not only going to continue to exist - it's going to grow and grow and grow. Its ties to West Germany will not be severed.