Quotes About History

On some nights it was best to remember the past, and not shut it in a drawer. Three hundred years ago people believed in the devil. They believed if an incident could not be explained, then the cause was something wicked, and that cause was often a woman who was said to be a witch. Women who did as they pleased, women with property, women

In Berlin evil came to them slowly and then all at once.

Women here in Massachusetts had been drowned and beaten and hanged, especially if they were found to have access to books other than the Bible, for the Puritans had been convinced that they alone had the ear of God.

History is personal . . . All that you are seeing is what's before you, the rest is guesswork.

If you're disconnected from someone for a long enough time, does blood still commit you to one another? Does history, or fate?

Knowledge was the way of our people, and knowledge was dangerous. It

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them.

First they burned the books, then the people who wrote them, then those who read them. They burned books about medicine and magic, books in Hebrew and in Spanish and Portuguese.

I do not know if he had a name, but I called him North, an appellation I think Beck would have approved of, for it was the name the Dutch called the Hudson River when they first came here, when men set to changing the world in their image, and gave all the wild things their own names.

That was history, in his opinion: that sorrow was unalterable and ever present. That tears could be preserved in the hardest granite.

If a woman doesn't write her own history, there are very few who will.

For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town.

History was easy: the past with all loss burned out of it, all sorrow worn out of it—all that was merely personal comfortably removed

WHEN JOHN AND MARY KEANE said "during the war," their children imagined the world gone black and white, imagined a hand passing like a dark cloud over the earth, blotting out the sun for what might only have been the duration of a single night, or the length of a storm. Long before any of them was born, after all, their parents, the world itself, had emerged from that shadow.

Il y avait derrière cette voix toute une histoire de nuits sombres, quelque chose d'exquis, quelque chose de dangereux.

The paper detritus that she had somewhere read, or had heard it said, trails armies, or was it (she had seen a photograph) the scraps of letters and wrappers and snapshots that blow across battlefields after all but the dead have fled?

The aim of therapy is not to correct the past, but to enable the patient to confront his own history, and to grieve over it.

Is it possible, then, to free ourselves altogether from illusions? History demonstrates that they sneak in everywhere, that every life is full of them—perhaps because the truth often seems unbearable to us. And yet the truth is so essential that its loss exacts a heavy toll, in the form of grave illness. In order to become whole we must try, in a long process, to discover our own personal truth, a truth that may cause pain before giving us a new sphere of freedom. If

Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of our truth about the unique history of our childhood.

To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents' ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.

Only if young people are allowed to know exactly what happened and why, if they no longer allow themselves to be deflected in their curiosity and do not fear the truth, can they free themselves from the burden of their forefathers' blindness. Such young people will certainly not condone the production of poisoned gas.

A million dollars in those days was a million dollars.

Do you ever think that there used to be more sensible explanations about things than there are now?

You remember your history?" He had finished five years of high school with respectable marks and a very good showing in trigonometry and geography but did not remember much history. In his final year, anyway, all you could think about was that you were going to the war. He said, "Not altogether.