Quotes About History

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

What I want to do is try to raise the level of SCI-Arc's original mission, which was to be forward-thinking. And let's face it, if you're forward-thinking and you're dealing in concepts of new ideas, history has told us that new ideas are not always wanted by everyone.

I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973.

I was basically raised to look for chances to get even with several families for stuff that happened 30 or 40 years before I was born.

People my age, we would hear from our parents and grandparents who were raised in Detroit about how great this city was from 1900 to the '60s.

How I was raised is what I am today.

I didn't know why dessert was invented or what function it was meant to perform. Raising livestock and the harvesting of grains are ancient activities, but when did humankind decide it also needed creme brulee?

One of the most cherished photographs in my life is a picture of me with John Lennon - who I met back in 1971 at an anti-war rally.

All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.

I was always looking at footage of dancers from Nicholas Brothers to Ralph Brown to Sand Man to Miller Brothers and Lois, and I grew up looking at old footage.

It's not like that anymore really, but back in the day, nobody would let the Misfits open up for them, not the Ramones, not the Cramps, nobody.

To understand how black projects began, and how they continue to function today, one must start with the creation of the atomic bomb. The men who ran the Manhattan Project wrote the rules about black operations. The atomic bomb was the mother of all black projects, and it is the parent from which all black operations have sprung.

It's disappointing that President Obama - who ran for office in 2008 saying he was going to be a fiscally responsible president - has caused the largest deficits and the largest debt in American history.

It's funny - Americans are the colonials who ran away from the royals, and yet we're fascinated by them.

Nobody was going to beat Barack Obama in 2008. That's a fact. It was his moment. It wasn't that John McCain ran a bad campaign, or picked the wrong VP. It was just that it didn't matter, it was over when it started.

Historically, for a stop-motion film, you gathered the crew together, you made the movie, and then everyone ran screaming to the next project.

Many historians will tell you that there are no laws of history and no great cycles that govern human events. History often appears more random than rhythmic. But if not patterns or cycles, there are certainly coincidences and some are so marked that they are hard not to notice.

I feel like Randy Couture has helped build the history in this sport.

We are extraordinarily lucky in the U.K. to have inherited a diverse range of cities that bear the imprints of many centuries of human habitation.

The further forward we go, the further back we have to explore in order to go forward again.

It might be the history major in me, but I look to the past when I try to construct my fictional futures.

We live in a world of crisis, of challenge, and... it's in our galleries that we can unpack the civilizations that we're seeing the current manifestations of.

I love watching 'Game of Thrones,' 'Rome,' and 'Spartacus' from the period dramas genre.

The reason a Congress-led coalition didn't happen in 1990 was because it is entirely possible that Rajiv Gandhi himself wasn't sure how the Congress party would evolve in that context.