Quotes About History

Han Solo. A legend of the Rebellion against the Empire. Trader, pirate, con man, and fighter extraordinaire. It was hard to believe he was real, Finn thought. Solo was history come to life.

This year, of course, being 1936, there would be no figs.

thirty-one of the first forty U.S. Post Office pilots were killed in the first six years).

the first step in liquidating a people . . . is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long the nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was.

It turns out that it is a lot easier to keep believing what everyone around us believes if we ignore or misrepresent the beliefs of our ancestors.

We must learn to think of our lives as stories that move along recognizable paths, paths followed by our predecessors and indeed indeed

Yes, I know that the word "school" derives from scholia, meaning leisure.

If the whole human race lay in one grave, the epitaph on its headstone might well be: 'It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Humanity takes itself too seriously. It is the world's original sin. If the caveman had known how to laugh, history would have turned out differently.

In a world where time is a sense, like sight or like taste, a sequence of episodes may be quick or may be slow, dim or intense, salty or sweet, causal or without cause, orderly or random, depending on the prior history of the viewer.

Philosophers have argued without a trend toward order; time would lack meaning. The future would be indistinguishable from the past. Sequences of events would be just so many random scenes from a thousand novels. History would be indistinct, like the mist slowly gathered by treetops in evening.

What we call the "future" is the condition of increasing mess; what we call the "past" is increasing tidiness.

If I have to have a past, then I prefer it to be multiple choice.

Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.

Sexually progressive cultures gave us literature, philosophy, civilization and the rest, while sexually restrictive cultures gave us the Dark Ages and the Holocaust.

I'm not exactly sure what happened. Sometimes I remember it one way, sometimes another... If I'm going to have a past, I prefer it to be multiple choice! ~ JOKER

The central question is, is this guy right? Or is he mad? What do you, the reader, think about this? Which struck me as a properly anarchist solution. I didn't want to tell people what to think, I just wanted to tell people to think and consider some of these admittedly extreme little elements, which nevertheless do recur fairly regularly throughout human history.

There... Poor little things. You see them? Standing with their numbers on their blank, indifferent faces, Nuremberg in miniature, the ranks of painted wooden men... Poor dominoes. Your pretty empire took so long to build, now, with a snap of history's fingers down it goes.

Nothing meant anything that couldn't be turned instantly into its opposite by any competent spin-doctor or spoon-bender. History and language had become so flexible, wrenched back and forth to suit each new agenda, that it seemed as if they might just simply snap in half and leave us floundering in a sea of mad Creationist revisions and greengrocers' punctuation.

There never was a Jack the Ripper. Mary Kelly was just an unusually determined suicide. Why don't we leave it there.

History, unendingly revised and reinterpreted, is seen upon examination as merely a different class of fiction; becomes hazardous if viewed as having any innate truth beyond this. Still, it is a function that we must inhabit. Lacking any territory that is not subjective, we can only live upon the map. All that remains in question is whose map we choose, whether we live within the world's insistent texts or else replace them with a stronger language of our own.

I find it difficult sometimes to read exploration as other than a euphemism for empire and exploitation. The

Bed-sheet creases print a river delta on Mick's back and in his restlessness it strikes him that civilisation and its history are similarly bagatelles, deluded into thinking that their progress has the ordered logic of a chess match when it's more the random ping of Tiddlywinks.

Everything is made of stories. They've all happened before, in similar circumstances. It's like a circle. It goes round and round and round.