Quotes About History

We have to ask if it is once again the summer of 1914. Small acts of terror in the Middle East, in South Asia, could lead to cataclysm as they did in Sarajevo.

The War on Terror is one of the most critical national security efforts in our history.

I truly believe that when the history books are written, our age will be remembered for three things: the war on terror, the digital revolution, and what we did - or did not do - to put the fire out in Africa. History, like God, is watching what we do.

This paradigm of the war on terror, connecting all kinds of armed resistance around the globe in one huge ideological framework, as a new ideology at a stage in history when most of the major ideologies are gone, does not reflect the facts on the ground.

My grandfather was facing this terror, my parents, myself.

While the 1963 Birmingham church bombing is the most historic, there also was a series of church burnings in the 1990s. Recognition of the terror those and similar acts impose on communities seems to have been forgotten post-Sept. 11, 2001.

The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.

Why doesn't anyone remember that the Palestinians already had four real opportunities to establish their state, yet each time they preferred to revert to terrorism?

Terrorism is not new to black people.

The British don't runaway from terrorism. We have had 30-odd years of terrorism in our own country from the Irish Republican Army. We're used to it.

Israel, an embattled democracy, has been fighting terrorism for over 100 years.

The fact is, working stiffs with few opportunities and scant education are generally too busy getting by to engage in revolutionary projects to remake society. And history, in fact, shows us that terrorism is generally a bourgeois endeavor.

The Charleston shooting is a result of an ingrained culture of racism and a history of terrorism in America. It should be covered as such.

My great-great-aunt was a terrorist. I'm not talking about the sense in which the pacifist Mahatma Gandhi was branded a terrorist by the British parliament in 1932: Pritilata Waddedar was an active participant in armed struggle against the British state. She supplied explosives. She fired a gun. And I'm proud of it.

I stepped into the bedroom where he was killed and looked up at the ceiling, where you could still see the patterns of blood that had spurted from bin Laden's head when the bullet fired by a U.S. Navy SEAL tore through the terrorist leader's face.

For those who may not know, it was the CBC that put in place the legislation that put sanctions against South Africa to end apartheid, and that took Mandela off the terrorist list.

9/11 was a sort of hinge event in American history, and all jihadi terrorist plots or attacks are kind of filtered through that lens.

There's a lot going on in the world that's very disturbing: rewriting the Holocaust; pseudo-historians rewriting history itself. And we're dealing with a terrorist mentality that involves whole nations.

More people died on 9/11, in one day, at the hand of Muslim terrorists than during the Inquisition.

I remember hearing Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Big Bill Broonzy, Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley and not really knowing anything about the geography or the culture of the music. But for some reason it did something to me - it resonated.

People's ability to forget what they do not want to know, to overlook what is before their eyes, was seldom put to the test better than in Germany at that time.

That was after Napoleon died because there is still a controversy as to whether Napoleon was poisoned with arsenic. And the French say the British did it and the British say the French did it, but he died before the test for arsenic was available.

I can still remember them wheeling the black and white TV sets into our classroom at school so we could watch the men landing on the Moon, and that obviously had a huge impact. I later found out those people flying Apollo were ex-military test pilots, so I decided to join the Air Force and become a test pilot.

I got this letter asking me if I wanted to or if I would consider going to experimental test pilot school and becoming the first Negro astronaut and I thought it was crazy.