Quotes About History

Detroit Art Institute Museum the

Black Bottom is walking tall, chin up, fist balled, brain firing on all cylinders. Black Bottom folk got steel in their spines, steel in their jaws, and steel in their will. But it wasn't always an attitude. Before it was razed, it was a place.

Who would have thought something that happened that long ago could have such power?

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the line stretches all the way back, perhaps to God; or to Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace life, in spite of the pain, the sorrow, is always a measure of what has gone before.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

All History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world.

Hard times' is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's 'hard times' were made harder by them.

The life of my people is to remember forever; each head granary is full. The life of your people is to forget: your thing granaries (museums), and not yourselves, are full.

Standing beside the river, realizing that the water of earth is recycled forever, she deeply understood this: that there are two presents. One is of the moment. The other is of a longer moment - the moment that includes the history and knowledge one knows. So that, she mused, if the tears shed by the mother of Isis are now part of this river then I am somehow connected to her in this longer present that I am able to envision and that contains both of us.

The real revolution is always concerned with the least glamorous stuff. With raising a reading level from second grade to third. With simplifying history and writing it down (or reciting it) for the old folks. With helping illiterates fill out a food-stamps form - for they must eat, revolution or not.

To acknowledge our ancestors means we are aware that we did not make ourselves...We remember them because it is an easy thing to forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel, fight, love, and die.

It is the need to be remembered that has caused most of the trouble in the world

Let us bring our attention to George's mother. She who came, weeping, and picked up the shattered pieces of her child, as black mothers have done for so long.

Some people don't understand that it is the nature of the eye to have seen forever, and the nature of the mind to recall anything that was ever known. Or that was the nature, I should say, until man started to put things on paper.

Although Africans once had a much better civilization than the European (though of course even the English do not say this: I get this from reading a man named J. A. Rogers) for several centuries they have fallen on hard times. Hard times is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's hard times were made harder by them.

A]ll History is current; all injustice continues on some level, somewhere in the world. 'Progress' affects few. Only revolution can affect many.

But they know who Adam is from they own point of view. And for a whole lot longer time ago. And who that? Mr. ______ ast. The first man that was white. Not the first man. They say nobody so crazy they think they can say who was the first man. But everybody notice the first white man cause he was white.

so you just think all the people from the bible were white too. But really white white people lived somewhere else during those times. That's why the bible says that Jesus Christ had hair like lamb's wool. Lamb's wool is not straight, Celie. It isn't even curly.

Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?

Hard times" is a phrase the English love to use, when speaking of Africa. And it is easy to forget that Africa's "hard times" were made harder by them.

Life was giving birth to children—who could have no memory of anything other than brutal enslavement—then dying and being tossed into a ravine or buried at the edge of a swamp or field.

She say Columbus come here in boats call the Neater, the Peter, and the Santomareater. Indians so nice to him he force a bunch of 'em back home with him to wait on the queen.

I put the odds on a psychic deathmatch between Attila the Hun and Virginia Woolf at fifty-fifty.

History does not care about the suffering of the individual. Only the outcome of their struggles.