Quotes About History

The French Army expended more artillery ammunition in September 1914 than it had done in the whole of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71. Total French production of the 75 mm shell in 1914 amounted to 14,000 shells a day, at a time when one single battery of 75 mm guns could easily shoot off 1,000 shells a day.

French losses, from August 1914 to 31 December 1915, came to 1,932,051 of whom no less than 1,001,271 were killed or missing. The British total in the same period was 512,420, of whom around 200,000 were killed or missing.

It is easier and much more satisfying to rail against the Right than to suggest that we go back to Genesis 1 and study together. Liberals can be just as intolerant as fundamentalists, and we have arrived at a moment in human history when intolerance and hope are mutually exclusive. (p. 6)

Walking the stacks in a library, dragging your fingers across the spines -- it's hard not to feel the presence of sleeping spirits.

Old-growth cultures, like old-growth forests, have not been exterminated. The land holds their memory and the possibility of regeneration. They are not only a matter of ethnicity or history, but of relationships born out of reciprocity between land and people.

Of course you should write about it. It's supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We've been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they'd understood the Thanksgiving then, we wouldn't be in this mess.

When George Washington directed federal troops to exterminate the Onondaga during the Revolutionary War, a nation that had numbered in the tens of thousands was reduced to a few hundred people in a matter of one year.

The storytellers begin by calling upon those who came before who passed the stories down to us, for we are only messengers.

We need to unearth the old stories that live in a place and begin to create new ones, for we are storymakers, not just storytellers.

All amphibians are tethered to the pond by their evolutionary history, the most primitive vertebrates to make the transition from the aquatic life of their ancestors to life on land.

man with long gray braids tells how his mother hid him away when the Indian agents came to take the children. He escaped boarding school by hiding under an overhung bank where the sound of the stream covered his crying. The others were all taken and had their mouths washed out with soap, or worse, for "talking that dirty Indian language.

The landscape has changed, but the story remains.

there is something like a mycorrhizal network that unites us, an unseen connection of history and family and responsibility to both our ancestors and our children. As

For the greater part of human history, and in places in the world today, common resources were the rule. But some invented a different story, a social construct in which everything ins a commodity to be bought and sold. The market economy story has spread like wildfire, with uneven results for human well-being and devastation for the natural world. But it it just a story we have told ourselves and we are free to tell another, to reclaim the old one.

Indigenous is a birthright word. No amount of time or caring changes history or substitutes for soul-deep fusion with the land.

my heart grieves for the one who could have told me stories of sweetgrass. All my life I have felt that loss. What was stolen at Carlisle has been a knot of sorrow I've carried like a stone buried in my heart.

In the way of linear time, you might hear Nanabozho's stories as mythic lore of history, a recounting of the long-ago past and how things came to be. But in circular time, these stories are both history and prophecy, stories for a time yet to come.

To restore sweetgrass here we'll need to loosen the hold of the colonists, opening a way for the return of the natives.

Of course you should write about it. It's supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We've been waiting five hundred years for people to listen. If they'd understood the Thanksgiving

...[K]now that however ugly the parts appear the whole remains beautiful. A severed hand Is an ugly thing, and man dissevered from the earth and stars and his history... for contemplation or in fact... Often appears atrociously ugly. Integrity is wholeness, the greatest beauty is Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of the universe....

Civilization is a transient sickness.

Never blame the man: his hard-pressed Ancestors formed him: the other anthropoid apes were safe In the great southern rain-forest and hardly changed In a million years: but the race of man was made By shock and agony… … a wound was made in the brain When life became too hard, and has never healed. It is there that they learned trembling religion and blood- sacrifice, It is there that they learned to butcher beasts and to slaughter men, And hate the world.

Our histories plan our futures.

He has dark eyes, thick eyebrows, and battered features. His nose has definitely been broken, probably a couple of times, and he's missing a piece of his ear, as if someone took a bite out of it. There's a story there, no doubt. I like that about his face. That it's a road map of been there, done that. It's interesting.