Quotes About History

The man that I named The Giver passed along to the boy knowledge, history, memories, color, pain, laughter, love, and truth. Every time you place a book in the hands of a child, you do the same thing.

A book, to me, is almost sacrosanct: such an individual and private thing. The reader brings his or her own history and beliefs and concerns, and reads in solitude, creating each scene from his own imagination as he does. There is no fellow ticket-holder in the next seat.

That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

It's just that . . . without the memories it's all meaningless. They gave that burden to me. And to the previous Receiver. And the one before him.

No. But why would I go back? I had found a home here, the way everyone has. That's why we have the Museum, Matty, to remind us of how we came, and why: to start fresh, and begin a new place from what we had learned and carried from the old.

my job is to transmit to you all the memories I have within me. Memories of the past.

They spoke of the history of Village, how each of them there had fled poverty and cruelty and been welcomed at this new place that had taken them in.

Grandparents. It meant parents-of-the-parents, long ago.' 'Back and back and back?' Jonas began to laugh.

the history of Denmark has much to teach us all.

Damn it, he mumbled apologetically, things like this never happened to Vorthalia the Bold. She raised a thoughtful eyebrow. How do you know? The histories of those times were all written by minstrels and poets. You try and think of a word that rhymes with 'bleeding ulcer

History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.

Yes. Now, you had that doctorate in Barrayaran history. Do any really interesting District succession squabbles spring to your memory?" "Lord Midnight the horse," Galeni replied at once. "Who always voted 'neigh.' 

Miles swallowed icy spit. Those who do not know their history, his thought careened, are doomed to keep stepping in it. Alas, so were those who did, it seemed.

Illyan once told me that half the secret of House Vorkosigan's preeminence in Barrayaran history was the quality of the people it drew to its service.

A typical tech toy. High-end this year, everywhere next year, nowhere after that until the antiquarians revival.

Do you remember," Ivan sighed, "that time in the back garden at Vorkosigan House, when you'd been reading all those military histories about the Cetagandan prison camps during the invasion, and you decided we had to dig an escape tunnel? Except it was you who did all the designing, and me and Elena who did all the digging?

We may never know the true story behind the book, but the book has become a myth, and myth is truer than history.

I assure you, these ancient mystics would have produced a radically different body of work had they in their wildest nightmares imagined that in some future dark age their secret coded scriptures would be seized by half-witted and sadistic European cannibals and interpreted literally, like some grotesque and racist history book.

Let the past not be forgotten. Let the lessons not be in vain.

and I thought of the nations and unpitying Time

Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke?

It isn't as if we got up today and said, What can we do to irritate America? It's because, since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation, from petition to the vote— everything—we've tried it all; there isn't anything that hasn't been exhausted.

TSHEMBE (Whirling on him, words flying) And just why should we be able to "talk" so easily? What is this marvelous nonsense with you Americans? For a handshake, a grin, a cigarette and half a glass of whiskey you want three hundred years to disappear—and in five minutes!