Quotes About History

All migrants leave their pasts behind, although some try to pack it into bundles and boxes-but on the journey something seeps out of the treasured mementoes and old photographs, until even their owners fail to recognize them, because it is the fate of migrants to be stripped of history, to stand naked amidst the scorn of strangers upon whom they see rich clothing, the brocades of continuity and the eyebrows of belonging..

The inevitable triumph of illusion over reality that was the single most obvious truth about the history of the human race.

My heart broke open and history fell in.

A man who catches History's eye is thereafter bound to a mistress from whom he will never escape.

The world is full of love stories, and all lovers are in a sense the avatars of their predecessors.

Family history, of course, has its proper dietary laws. One is supposed to swallow and digest only the permitted parts of it, the halal portions of the past, drained of their redness, their blood. Unfortunately, this makes the stories less juicy...

William the Conqueror, it is said, began by eating a mouthful of English sand.

Knowledge was never simply born in the human mind; it was always reborn. The relaying of wisdom from one age to the next, this cycle of rebirths: this was wisdom.

History could claw upward as well as down. The powerful could be deafened by the cries of the poor.

History is natural selection. Mutant versions of the past struggle for dominance; new species of fact arise,and old, saurian truths go to the wall, blindfolded and smoking last cigarettes. Only the mutations of the strong survive. The weak, the anonymous, the defeated leave few marks: field-patterns, axe-heads, folk-tales, broken pitchers, burial mounds, the fading memory of their youthful beauty. History loves only those who dominate her: it is a relationship of mutual enslavement.

Why, alone of all the more-than-five-hundred-million, should I have to bear the burden of history?

Is history to be considered the property of the participants only?

Who what am I? My answer: I am the sum total of everything that went before me, of all I have been seen done, of everything done-to-me. I am everyone everything whose being-in-the-world affected was affected by mine. I am anything that happens after I've gone which would not have happened if I had not come

H]as it really been so long since religions persecuted people, burning them as heretics, drowning them as witches, that you can't recognize religious persecution when you see it? [ 1,000 Days 'Trapped Inside a Metaphor' (Columbia University / The New York Times , December 12, 1991)]

Sometimes legends make reality, and become more useful than the facts.

Symbolic value of the pickling process: all the six hundred million eggs which gave birth to the population of India could fit inside a single, standard-sized pickle-jar; six hundred million spermatozoa could be lifted on a single spoon. Every pickle-jar (you will forgive me if I become florid for a moment) contains, therefore, the most exalted of possibilities: the feasibility of the chutnification of history; the grand hope of the pickling of time!

Methwold's hair, parted in the middle has a lot to do with my beginnings. It was one of those hairlines along which history and sexuality moved.

If you take a look at history, you will find that the understanding of what is good and evil has always existed before the individual religions. The religions were only invented by people afterwards, in order to express this idea.

We, the living, must find what space we can alongside them; the giant dead whom we cannot tie down, though we grasp at their hair, though we rope them while they sleep

She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own

because it is the privilige and the curse of midnight's children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.

The system is corrupt, a young man on a bicycle shouted, and if it cannot be changed it must be destroyed. The mastodon revolution is here and you must all choose which side of history you want to be on.

In this century history stopped paying attention to the old psychological orientation of reality. I mean, these days, character isn't destiny any more. Economy is destiny. Ideology is destiny. Bombs are destiny. What does a famine, a gas chamber, a grenade care how you lived your life? Crisis comes, death comes, and your pathetic individual self doesn't have a thing to do with it, only to suffer the effects.

We walk unknowing amid the shadows of our past and, forgetting our history, are ignorant of ourselves.