Quotes About History

We have to get the facts right as best as we can. Otherwise, history becomes what Du Bois referred to as "lies agreed upon.

King conveyed the gravity of the moment in 1968 and the necessity for the Poor People's Campaign, he conjured, without a hint of nostalgia, a history of the heroism of everyday people acting against all odds, a history no less full of disappointment and trauma. He

But the lie's most pernicious effect when it comes to our history is to malform events to fit the story whenever America's innocence is threatened by reality.

Baldwin wrote in another after times—that of the collapse of the civil rights movement, bearing witness to a time when many thought the nation was poised to change, only to have darkness descend and change arrested.

those who willfully refuse to remember become moral monsters.

It was a place that denied the contradiction between its commitments to freedom and democracy and its practice of slavery and white supremacy.

what W.E.B. Du Bois described as "a hope not hopeless but unhopeful.

Trump and his legions invoke a history to justify their belief in the value gap. In doing so, they stand in the long lineage of white people in the United States who have used a certain understanding of the past to reinforce the injustices of the present day. Baldwin's moral vision requires a confrontation with history—with slavery and with the ongoing consequences of the after times—shorn of the rosy tint of American innocence in order to overcome its hold on us.

In the effort to deny from whence we came," Baldwin declared, "we've had to make up a series of myths about it.

Slavery would be banished from view or seen as a mistake instead of a defining institution of systemic cruelty in pursuit of profit. That history would fortify our national identity, and any attempt to confront the lie itself would be sabotaged by the fear that we may not be who we say we are. For white people in this country, "America" is an identity worth protecting at any cost. —

Life moves fast. As much as you can learn from your history, you have to move forward.

The past is a pebble in my shoe.

The museums are here to teach the history of art and something more as well, for, if they stimulate in the weak a desire to imitate, they furnish the strong with the means of their emancipation.

I am Anne Rutledge who sleep beneath these weeds,Beloved in life of Abraham Lincoln.

People asked us, "Do you read history?" "No," I answered. "We are too busy making it.

Today as in the time of Pliny and Columella, the hyacinth flourishes in Wales, the periwinkle in Illyria, the daisy on the ruins of Numantia; while around them cities have changed their masters and their names, collided and smashed, disappeared into nothingness, their peaceful generations have crossed down the ages as fresh and smiling as on the days of battle.

Skepticism is history's bedfellow.

A look at Chinese history showed that some of China's ablest patriots were at one time or another labeled bandits.

None of us can boast about the morality of our ancestors. The record does not show that Adam and Eve were ever married.

Of all the places I didn't want to live, the past was at the top of the list.

A people's literature is the great textbook for real knowledge of them. The writings of the day show the quality of the people as no historical reconstruction can.

The anthropologists are busy, indeed, and ready to transport us back into the savage forest where all human things have their beginnings but the seed never explains the flower.

Barbarism is needed every four or five hundred years to bring the world back to life. Otherwise it would die of civilization.

Those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.