Quotes About History

The past and the present coagulate into something that makes sense to him.

No, no, Claude thought, the past never stops banging at the doors of the present. We pack it into tattered suitcases, lock it into rusting metal trunks beneath our beds, press it between yellowed pages of newsprint, but it hangs over us at night like a poisonous cloud, seeps into our shirt collars and bedclothes.

But what can be learned from trivia? A history of inventions reveals we made the gun silencer (1908) before air conditioning (1911), the kaleidoscope (1817) before Braille printing (1829), cocaine (1860) before penicillin (1929). It's a story about pleasure before usefulness, about ingenuity in killing before improving our everyday lives." The Beautiful Miscellaneous,

Was this where my fascination for documented history came from? From a family so afraid of earthly erasure that they couldn't discard the transcript of ordering two pounds of prosciutto on June 15, 1988?

La vida de Manuel Benítez El Cordobés ha sido una de las más grandes epopeyas históricas mundiales

Longing on a large scale is what makes history.

In the face of technology, everything becomes a little atavistic.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art. It's another part of the twentieth-century mind. It's the world seen from inside. We've come to a certain point in the history of film. If a thing can be filmed, the film is implied in the thing itself. This is where we are. The twentieth century is on film. You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.

The figure of the gunman in the window was inextricable from the victim and his history. This sustained Oswald in his cell. It gave him what he needed to live. The more time he spent in a cell, the stronger he would get. Everybody knew who he was now.

Wine was one of the first signs of civilization to appear in the life of human beings," he said. "It is in the Bible, it is in Homer, it shines through all the pages of history, participating in the destiny of ingenious men. It gives spirit to those who know how to taste it, but it punishes those who drink it without restraint.

After picking, grapes were crushed with bare feet. The must, or grape juice, was then poured into giant vats, followed by a process called pigeage, in which naked workers plunged themselves into the frothy liquid. Holding tightly to chains that had been fastened to overhead beams, the workers would then raise and lower themselves over and over again, stirring the must with their entire bodies so as to aerate the mixture and enhance the fermentation.

The Hugel story, in many ways, is the story of Alsace. "My grandfather had to change his nationality four times," Johnny's brother André said. Grandfather Emile was born in 1869. He was born French, but two years later, in 1871, Alsace was taken over by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War, and he became German. The end of World War I in 1918 made him French again. In 1940, when Alsace was annexed, he was forced to become German.

For the Rothschilds of Château Lafite-Rothschild in Bordeaux, it meant fleeing the country before the Germans took over their property.

From personal experience, Kenzo knew about the state of racial equality in America. It was sound in theory, but not in practice. It was a glorious dream, but just a dream. It would never work. It had never worked--not anywhere, not anytime in history--and the US was the only country foolish and hypocritical enough to try.

Blood will tell, but often it tells too much.

Similarly, dubbing everyone whose reading of history leads them to conclusions different from the preferred ones black-armband historians; channelling frustrations felt by the politically powerless to the politically correct; isolating chattering classes and elites from a pretended mainstream – all these and many terms of political abuse are common and inevitable in democracies – and all have parallels in tyrannies.

Mexico is a country where the temples of the new gods are built on the gravesites of the old.

Mexico is a cemetery for secrets.

Mexico, the land of pyramids and palaces, deserts and jungles, mountains and beaches, markets and gardens, boulevards and cobblestoned streets, broad plazas and hidden courtyards, is now known as a slaughter ground. And for what? So North Americans can get high.

Shakespeare: "The evil that men do lives after them.

Do you know what history is?" Peter asks. "History?" "Yeah." "I dunno," Frankie says, "it's things that happened." "No," Peter says, "it's what people say happened.

The good old days sucked.

You can no more cut yourself away from the past than you can cut out your own heart.

When you ask people, "What's America's longest war?" they usually answer "Vietnam" or amend that to "Afghanistan," but it's neither. America's longest war is the war on drugs.