Quotes About History

for it does take greatness, I think, to stand resolutely against your own people, especially when you are alone, and especially when you that even history will not be kind to you, since you will have forever given the lie all the claims with which the High and the Mighty will try to exonerate themselves.

The difference, Gopal told the Rationalists, between the Science Association and their own society was that they did not consider science alone, something people pursued in the seclusion of laboratories, important in itself. He himself was studying not science but English literature. Their aim was the application of rational principles to everything around them—to their own lives, to society, to religion, to history. It didn't matter what.

The old loyalties of India, the ancient ones – they'd been destroyed long ago; the British had built their Empire by effacing them.

The masthead said The Colonial Services Gazette, in beautiful Gothic characters. Beside the name was a dateline: 'Calcutta, the twelfth of January, 1898'.

When my father was a young man in Vilna, every wall in Europe said, Jews go home to Palestine. Fifty years later, when he went back to Europe on a visit, the walls all screamed, Jews get out of Palestine.

after two thousand years we've established a state so as to have someone to steal from.

You've held the world in your hands for thousands of years and you've turned it into a horror show.

And yet, had it not been for Judas, there might not have been a crucifixion, and had there been no crucifixion, there would have been no Christianity.

We are all Judas. Even eighty generations later we are still Judas.

Of course you can't understand. All you can do is destroy a village without knowing anything about its people or its history, without wanting to know. Just like that. Like a mad bull. Of course you don't understand. What do you understand? Fucking and killing, that's what you understand. And soccer. And shares in the bus cooperative. You're a wild animal, not a human being. A wild, stupid, animal.

The grown-ups who still remembered usually chose to stay silent. To deny. To pretend they'd forgotten

If her history has taught her anything it's that hate, not love, is the more powerful of the two emotions. Anyway

The word literature enters the room with its nose in the air. But get it in a corner, ask the right questions, and it will reluctantly fess up to its humble origins. It hails from the Latin litterae, you whisper in your date's ear. It puts on a big act, but it literally just means "things made of letters.

What is the past but what we choose to remember?

So much of history is mystery. We don't know what is lost forever, what will surface again. All objects exist in a moment of time. And that fragment of time is preserved or lost or found in mysterious ways. Mystery is a wonderful part of life.

Joy Luck was an idea my mother remembered from the days of her first marriage in Kweilin, before the Japanese came. That's why I think of Joy Luck as her Kweilin story.

She didn't even pause to think. She simply said in a way that made it clear there was no more to the story: Your father is not my first husband. You are not those babies.

Qué es el pasado si no aquello que elegimos recordar?

What happened in Nanking, I couldn't claim that as my tragedy. I was not affected. I was not killed.

Look at that. There one family lives, kitchen is in China, bedroom is in Myanmar. In this way, this family eats in one country, sleeps in other. I think this house been standing there for many centuries, yes, long time, before anyone decided where one country stops, the other starts

Isn't the past what people remember- who did what, how and why? And what the people remember, isn't that mostly what they've already chosen to believe?

old books -- little tombstones of ideas and history

Die Vergangenheit war wie jene altmodischen, mit Kräutern und Blumen gefüllten Duftkissen, deren Aroma die Kleider durchdringt und an ihnen haften bleibt.

She fell in love with an extinct volcano.