Quotes About History

Then as I was getting up to the Closerie des Lilas with the light on my old friend, the statue of Marshal Ney with his sword out and the shadows of the trees on the bronze, and he alone there and nobody behind him and what a fiasco he'd made of Waterloo, I thought that all generations were lost by something and always had been and always would be and I stopped at the Lilas to keep the statue company and drank a cold beer before going home to the flat over the sawmill.

All remembrance of things past is fiction.

Nobody knows what tribes we came from nor what our tribal inheritance is nor what the mysteries were in the woods where the people lived that we came from. All we know is that we do not know. We know nothing about what happens to us in the nights.

It is a curious fact of literary history that a story which describes the loss of a gigantic prize provided the author with the greatest prize of his career. —

And I know old songs such as the loss of John Jacob Astor on the Titanic when sunk by an iceberg and I would be glad to sing them rather than that no peas no rice song if you so wish.

God pity the Spanish people. Any leader they have will muck them.

He was the archivist, and all the archives of the town were in his office. That has nothing to do with the story. Anyway

Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all.

Pensé que todas las generaciones se pierden por algo y siempre se han perdido y siempre se perderán.

No. Hieronymus Bosch. Very old-timer. Very good. Pieter Brueghel worked on that too.

The reason you are so sore you missed the war is because war is the best subject of all. It groups the maximum of material and speeds up the action and brings out all sorts of stuff that normally you have to wait a lifetime to get.

Perhaps wars weren't won any more. Maybe they went on forever. Maybe it was another Hundred Years' War.

We're no kin, Thomas Hudson said. We just used to live in the same town and make some of the same mistakes.

Any man's life, told truly, is a novel

We've only been living in these ghettos for seventy-five years or so, but the other three hundred years -- I think this is worth writing about. I think we've made tremendous sacrifices, we've shown tremendous strength. In the ghetto you see a lot of frustration; you see very little strength.

Ain't we all been hurt by slavery?

Prior to the studies by Renan and Straus, historians thought myth was an obstacle to be removed in the search for the actual truth of history. But these new writers treated myth as a source of insight into the ways people viewed themselves and their universe. What if instead of treating myth as an illusion and a falsification, we saw it as an expression of people's deepest dreams?

The past is preserved only in darkness, the future is not raised to the level of an image, as something which can be anticipated. It is the symbolic expression which first creates the possibility of looking backward and looking forward... What occurred in the past, now separated out from the totality of representations, no longer passes away, once the sounds of language have placed their seals on it and given it a certain stamp.

Our citizenship is in eternity; history is our temporary residence.

See Him everywhere. His fingerprints in every page of human history. Feel him move in the wind, hear his roar in the ocean, know his presence in every breath.

Las viejas costumbres mueren despacio

The first of the tea ships, the Dartmouth

THE fourteenth of April, 1775.

Adultery has existed since marriage was invented, and so too has the taboo against it. It has been legislated, debated, politicized, and demonized throughout history.