Quotes About History

La única lección que nos enseña la historia es que nunca aprendemos de ella.1

Qué había ocurrido con nuestra moral desde el 11 de septiembre? Temía saber la respuesta. Tras la primera y la segunda guerra mundial, nosotros —Occidente— plantamos un bosque de legislación para impedir

watching and witnessing history and then, despite the dangers and constraints and our human imperfections, recording it as honestly as we can.

Armin Wegner, un enfermero alemán y alférez en el séquito del mariscal de campo Von der Goltz, desobedeció las órdenes y tomó centenares de fotografías de las víctimas armenias en los campos de Ras al Ain, Rakka, Alepo y Deir ez Zor. Hoy esas desgarradoras fotografías de muertos y moribundos constituyen el núcleo de los testimonios fotográficos.

Sin embargo, cuando en el 2000 el Senado francés propuso reconocer el genocidio armenio de 1915, el secretario general del Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores respondió con una declaración que podría haber sido emitida por la embajada turca. Loïc Hennekinne dijo que ésa no era tarea del parlamento y que la historia «debía ser interpretada por los historiadores».

The cedars 'know the history of the earth better than history itself.' If this was so, it was little wonder that they had clung to life only here, up in these high altitudes where the mountains, ice and wind ensured that the Lebanese who so often took the name of the cedars in vain would rarely appear.

It's a journalist's job to be a witness to history. We're not there to worry about ourselves. We're there to try and get as near as we can, in an imperfect world, to the truth and get the truth out.

It's going to be a long row to hoe to bring the white South to any sense of shame, or to make them wake up to the brute fact that the golden age they hark back to and are fighting tooth and nail to perpetuate was a slave-holding, slave-breeding, slave-driving, slave-hunting hell on earth. The crime of the white South is centered in their racist unity of loyalty which blinds them to the real state of their society and its discontents

The land was ours before we were the land's.She was our land more than a hundred yearsBefore we were her people.

I believe that imagination is stronger than knowledge. That myth is more potent than history. That dreams are more powerful than facts. That hope always triumphs over experience. That laughter is the only cure for grief. And I believe that love is stronger than death.

It is an old habit with theologians to beat the living with the bones of the dead.

No one, in the world's whole history, ever attempted to substantiate a truth by a miracle. Truth scorns the assistance of miracle. Nothing but falsehood ever attested itself by signs and wonders. No miracle ever was performed, and no sane man ever thought he had performed one, and until one is performed, there can be no evidence of the existence of any power superior to, and independent of nature.

I regard the Bible, especially the Old Testament, the same as I do most other ancient books, in which there is some truth, a great deal of error, considerable barbarism and a most plentiful lack of good sense.

The theologians dead, knew no more than the theologians now living.

Nobody ever saw anybody who had seen anybody who had heard of anybody that had ever seen anybody that had ever seen one of the original Hebrew manuscripts.

When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf.

the Bible is a book written by ignorance—at the instigation of fear.

it was weird. Would you believe it if some supermodel called you up and told you she was your sister?' Strike thought of his own bizarre family history. 'Probably,' he said.

He had spent much of his childhood perched on the coast, with the taste of salt in the air: this was a place of woodland and river, mysterious and secretive in a different way from St. Mawes, the little town with its long smuggling history, where colorful houses tumbled down to the beach.

Edinburgh House. He had heard that in its industrial heyday, Corby had had

History is the geology of human experience, a study, as it were, of tragedy and comedy laid down in the strata of past lives. In death there are no winners or losers, merely people who once lived but can never live again. What they thought, what they believed, what they hoped, is largely lost. That which remains is history.

Clearly, this is an historic form of waterboarding, and, interestingly, the professional torturers of the Inquisition were not only happy to define it as a form of torture, but by the early 1600s had abandoned it in favour of methods they 'regarded as more merciful'.46

Now it's your land. But it's important, at least to me,that you remember that it's not just your land. There is a history. Now you're part of it. Good night. And off they go.

And even as the chariot of time hustles me along, I never forget that Bob Caro is coming up from behind with volume five of LBJ. I hope he makes it. I hope I make it.