Quotes About History

Those [Watergate] tapes are going to take me to my grave with a huge smile on my face.

Whose yesterdays look backwards with a smile.

We live in a society of an imposed forgetfulness, a society that depends on public amnesia.

J. Edgar Hoover: When morals decline and good men do nothing, evil flourishes. A society unwilling to learn from past is doomed. We must never forget our history.

The society that loses its grip on the past is in danger, for it produces men who know nothing but the present, and who are not aware that life had been, and could be, different from what it is.

Architecture is the very mirror of life.You only have to cast your eyes on buildings to feel the presence of the past, the spirit of a place; they are the reflection of society.

Any society which suppresses the heritage of its conquered minorities, prevents their history or denies them their symbols, has sown the seeds of their own destruction.

If you have a disease of the old society, take a dose of Lenin as medication.

The sociological imagination enables us to grasp history and biography and the relations between the two within society. This is its task and its promise.

A fully functional multiracial society cannot be achieved without a sense of history and open, honest dialogue.

Play is older than culture, for culture, however inadequately defined, always presupposes human society, and animals have not waited for man to teach them their playing.

No Statue of Liberty ever greeted our arrival in this country...we did not, in fact, come to the United States at all. The United States came to us.

Far from being magisterial in its objectivity, science was conditioned by history, society, and the prejudices of scientists.

To be an Indian in modern American society is in a very real sense to be unreal and ahistorical.

Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.

The present is saturated with the past and pregnant with the future.

History is on every occasion the record of that which one age finds worthy of note in another.

There were people who said the Society of Cincinnati in the American revolution, of which George Washington was one of the shining lights, was a branch of the Illuminati.

The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.

Someone is always at my elbow reminding me that I am the granddaughter of slaves. It fails to register depression with me. Slavery is sixty years in the past. The operation was successful and the patient is doing well, thank you.

I was a Southerner and had the map of Dixie on my tongue.

Isn't it confoundedly easy to think you're a great man if you aren't burdened with the slightest idea that Rembrandt, Beethoven, Dante or Napoleon ever lived?

The strength of a love is always misjudged if we evaluate it by its immediate cause and not the stress that went before it, the dark and hollow space full of disappointment and loneliness that precedes all the great events in the heart's history.

t was not illiterate savages, but graduates of the finest educational systems of the West who designed the gas chambers used to burn millions of innocent men, women and children in Germany.