Quotes About History

one man created the Pont Neuf.

Although we are necessarily concerned, in a chronicle of events, with physical action by the light of day, history suggests that the human spirit wanders farthest in the silent hours between midnight and dawn. Those dark fruitful hours, seldom recorded, whose secret flowerings breed peace and war, loves and hates, the crowning or uncrowning of heads.

He flicked through the yellowed rough-cut pages and breathed its musty smell. It filled him with a strange excitement, as if he'd caught a whiff of ancient, buried cities.

Dates are convenient hooks on which we can hang our memories of events. But history is all about people - people like you and me who did things to change the world.

We must stand together, realizing the complexity of our histories, both personal and social, choosing when we can tolerate each other's company and when we cannot. We must never pretend to be experts on each other's lives, never belittle the deep differences that do exist or pretend that we do not see the places of exposed pain.

History is not a dead thing or a sure thing. It lived with our choices and our dreams. It is the story of our glories and our sadnesses. It is at different times a lover, an enemy, a teacher, a prophet. It is always a collective memory as complicated and contradictory as people who lived it, but it is always a people's story. Let our tale be marked by our knowledge of what had to be done, and let it shine with the passion of our attempt.

Coalition politics, the building of bridges between disparate groups who share a common vision of how things should be, is a strategy that calls for a tough blend of clarity, compassion, and most of all the willingness to experience someone else's history.

Yeah, I read history. But it doesn't make you nice. Hitler read history, too.

She doesn't understand the concept of Roman numerals. She thought we just fought in world war eleven.

Those who expect moments of change to be comfortable and free of conflict have not learned their history.

The point of new historical investigation is to disrupt the notion of fixity, to discover the nature of the debate or repression that leads to the appearance of timeless permanence

Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict

DneÅ¡ní Francie není zemí rovných pÃ…â"¢íležitostí, rasismus je zde krutou realitou, jako ostatnÄ› vÅ¡ude jinde na svÄ›tÄ›. Ale hulákat, že se nezmÄ›nila od dob kolonializmu, je jako poplivat památku tÄ›ch, kteÃ…â"¢í skute?nÄ› pod vládou koloniálního imperializmu trpÄ›li.

You have on your history," said the artist, "and we're not used to that, believe me. Not to history. Not to old she-wolves with livid marks running up their ribs and arms, and not to the idea of fights in which people are neither painlessly killed nor painlessly fixed up but linger and die--slowly--or heal--slowly.

WE WUZ PUSHED.

When the memory of one's predecessors is buried, the as­sumption persists that there were none and each generation of women believes itself to be faced with the burden of doing everything for the first time.

You told me ghouls were male. Rodan is male - and asinine. King Kong is male. I could've been a witch, but the Devil is male. Faust is male. The man who dropped the bomb on Hiroshima was male. I was never on the moon.

I'd never be more than a toy to him, and the men in his family had a history of breaking their toys. They just did it in different ways.

The Arkansas House deserves special mention. In 1837, when a representative insulted the Speaker during debate, the Speaker stepped down from his platform, bowie knife in hand, and killed him. Expelled and tried for murder, he was acquitted for excusable homicide and reelected, only to pull his knife on another legislator during debate, though this time the sound of colleagues cocking pistols stopped him cold.

As tempting as it is to dismiss American slavery in the pre–Civil War decades as an antiquated holdover doomed to extinction, in the early decades of the nineteenth century it was flourishing.7

They had written it "for those who come after us to study, as an example of what it once cost to be in favor of liberty,

After all, words are what remain when all the deeds have been done. Words can shatter faith; start a war; change the course of history. A story can make your heart beat faster; topple walls; scale mountains - hey, a story can even raise the dead. And that's why the King of Stories ended up being the King of the gods; because writing history and making history are only the breadth of a page apart.

Well, that's history for you, folks. Unfair, untrue and for the most part written by folk who weren't even there.

An astrologer told Coco Chanel that five was her lucky number. So she named her first perfume Chanel No. 5 and launched it on the fifth day of May (the fifth month). The rest, as they say, is history.