Quotes About History

It seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl

Papier ist geduldiger als Menschen. (S.18)

Hanneli und Sanne waren fruher meine besten Freundinnen, und wer uns zusammen sah, sagte immer: ,,Da laufen Anne, Hanne und Sanne.

Papier ist geduldiger als Menschen.

I told myself that historically when people do too well too quickly, they are a Greek tragedy waiting to happen.

When the ancient Egyptians finished building the pyramids, they had built the pyramids.

Mankind has a history of forgetting the unpleasant, the undesirable. Bu ignoring its existence, it can make the source of past Terror disappear.

Mankind has a history of forgetting the unpleasant, the undesirable. But ignoring its existence, it can make the source of past Terror disappear.

It isn't often one gets the chance to entertain one's great-great-great-grandmother. Sassinak.

History is the poisoned well, seeping into the ground-water. It's not the unknown past we're doomed to repeat, but the past we know. Every recorded event is a brick of potential, of precedent, thrown into the future. Eventually the idea will hit someone in the back of the head. This is the duplicity of history: an idea recorded will become an idea resurrected. Out of fertile ground, the compost of history.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers. History is the Totenbuch, The Book of the Dead, kept by the administrators of the camps. Memory is the Memorbucher, the names of those to be mourned, read aloud in the synagogue.

There was no energy of a narrative in my family, not even the fervour of an elegy.

History is the love that enters us through death.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.

History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral; what we consciously remember is what our conscience remembers.

The tombstones smashed in Hebrew cemeteries and plundered for Polish sidewalks; today bored citizens, staring at their feet while waiting for a bus, can still read the inscriptions.

How quickly a moment sinks into the past.

Las antiguas lealtades nunca se descartaban del todo. Narraway

Those who hold power have never in all history been inclined to relinquish it willingly. Usually it has been taken from them by force, or it has slipped from their hands because they were too weak or corrupt to retain it.

Not all the inquisitors of Spain were cruel or narrow-minded men, you know. Some truly believed they were saving the souls of those in their charge. They would be astounded if they knew how we perceived them now.

the day mankind learns to profit from the lessons of history I shall look for the Second Coming.