Quotes About History

They didn't want to have any children in the Third Reich because eventually those children would be put into brown shirts and drilled to become soldiers.

This is where I come from. And it's where you come from. You'll never get away from that, and don't you forget it.

That's when I decided the point of travel was not to observe history, but to change it.

As long as we tell our urban ancestors' stories, no city is ever lost. They live on, in our imaginations and on our public lands, as a promise that no matter how terrible things get, humans always try again.

Many of these accounts became popular with the American public, and family clans like "The Jukes" and "The Kallikaks" became widely known, entering the public imagination as poor, dirty, drunken, criminally minded, and sexually perverse people.

I remember abortion being legal in the United States

Collective action means that when someone does something small or personal, their actions can change history too.

Although Semper, an amateur ethnographer, may have been influenced by primitivist and Orientalist imaginations, he also came to see the history of ornament as the breakdown of ethnography, by understanding ornaments not as pristine cultural or national signifiers but instead as "portable ecology

Apparently, as historian Paul Kramer dryly observes, "for California officials and in the eyes of the law, there is little difference between disability, immorality, and Chinese femininity.

Moscow. In the early 1930s, however, such glasnost

The founders themselves were not so certain: their beloved classical authors taught them that history was circular, that human nature was flawed, and that special measures were needed to prevent democracy from sliding back into tyranny.

If we do not try harder to remember the history of the other half of the European continent, the history of the other twentieth-century totalitarian regime, in the end it is we in the West who will not understand our past, we who will not know how our world came to be the way it is. And

Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

Totalitarian ideologies never die, and neither do their appeal, and so their consequences must be carefully re-explained for each generation. (...) Mass movements offer confidence and safety. History is always available for rewriting.

No hay una explicación única, y no voy a ofrecer aquí ni una gran teoría ni una solución universal. Pero sí hay un tema de fondo: dadas las condiciones adecuadas, cualquier sociedad puede dar la espalda a la democracia. De hecho, si nos hemos de guiar por la historia, a la larga todas nuestras sociedades lo harán.

Our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds. It will be one of its chief claims to notice in the moral history of humanity. —Julien Benda, La trahison des clercs, 1927

there is a theme: Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

There is no single explanation, and I will not offer either a grand theory or a universal solution. But there is a theme: Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

single explanation, and I will not offer either a grand theory or a universal solution. But there is a theme: Given the right conditions, any society can turn against democracy. Indeed, if history is anything to go by, all of our societies eventually will.

Nuestra época es de hecho la época de la organización intelectual de los odios políticos. Este será uno de sus principales rasgos a destacar en la historia moral de la humanidad. JULIEN BENDA, La trahison des clercs, 1927

disappeared beneath Soviet avenues of cracked concrete; how variety – medieval stone foundations, baroque seminarium doors, classical columns, Prussian red brick walls, and delicate shop windows – had vanished behind spectacular monotony; how churches and pastry shops, farmers' markets, tobacconists, a university and schools and law courts gave way to numbered apartment blocks.

As for the croissant, Marie Antoinette brought the recipe when she came from her native Austria to marry King Louis XVI. And she, history claims, added her own spark to the fire of the French Revolution by saying of the populace demanding bread, "Let them eat cake.

And in the act of making things, just by living their daily lives, they also make history. Knitting is clothing made in spare moments, or round the fire, whenever women gathered together... It's something to celebrate-clothes made in love and service, something women have always done.

The other thing I realized by the end of the evening was that humans and the Others did have one thing in common—we both had a love for, and fascination with, stories. I learned that every form of terra indigene had its own teaching stories as well as stories that were the repository of their history and connection to the world. And they all had stories that were told for the fun of it.