Quotes About History

We tend to crave a "and so it is" and "so it was" that the illusion of a single perspective brings, but one thing I have learned from being in the world is that there is no such panopticon. Panopticons are for surveillance states. It behooves us as writers and artists at this moment in history to honor the unknown and the unknowable.

People who cannot find their way out of history are lost, and so are their nations.

History does not need explanatory principles, but only words to tell how things were.

Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

It all happened so fast. The ghetto. The deportation. The sealed cattle car. The fiery altar upon which the history of our people and the future of mankind were meant to be sacrificed.

Rejected by mankind, the condemned do not go so far as to reject it in turn. Their faith in history remains unshaken, and one may well wonder why. They do not despair. The proof: they persist in surviving not only to survive, but to testify.The victims elect to become witnesses.

I marvel at the resilience of the Jewish people. Their best characteristic is their desire to remember. No other people has such an obsession with memory.

You'll try to reveal what should remain hidden, you'll try to incite people to learn from the past and rebel, but they will refuse to believe you. They will not listen to you…. You'll possess the truth, you already do; but it's the truth of a madman.

In Jewish history there are no coincidences.

No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.

Now, when I hear that Christians are getting together in order to defend the people of Israel, of course it brings joy to my heart. And it simply says, look, people have learned from history.

That is my major preoccupation --memory, the kingdom of memory. I want to protect and enrich that kingdom, glorify that kingdom and serve it.

To forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.

There is divine beauty in learning... To learn means to accept the postulate that life did not begin at my birth. Others have been here before me, and I walk in their footsteps. The books I have read were composed by generations of fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, teachers and disciples. I am the sum total of their experiences, their quests. And so are you.

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time.

For in the end, it is all about memory, its sources and its magnitude, and, of course, its consequences.

His cold eyes stared at me. At last, he said wearily: "I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.

We are dealing here not with the dogmas of a church, but rather with events that for thousands of years have exercised the most powerful influence in the history of a living people. Jewish children were not taught: 'These are the things we Jews believe in', but 'These are the things that happened to us and made us what we are

Harvard Square looked both new and familiar. I felt like I would have been able to tell just from looking that this configuration of buildings and streets was familiar and meaningful to lots of people, not just me. It was weird to visit a suburb that nobody else every visited or went to, and then to return to these widely known halls and buildings where famous statesmen and writers and scientists had been coming for hundreds of years.

Andrea had brought kifli: crescent-shaped rolls first baked by Hungarians to commemorate the Turks' defeat in Vienna, and later introduced by Marie Antoinette in Paris, where they became known as croissants.

Any piece of information seemed to produce an opinion on contact. Meanwhile, I went from class to class, read hundreds, thousands of pages of the distilled ideas of the great thinkers of human history, and nothing happened. In high school I had been full of opinions, but high school had been like prison, with constant opposition and obstacles. Once the obstacles were gone, meaning seemed to vanish, too.

There is this way that I felt when I was younger that we were beyond history and we were all citizens of the world that now seems so naive.

I went on to the balcony, lit a cigarette, and looked at the museum, wondering whether it would still be there in a thousand years. When would it not be there anymore?