Quotes About History

I began to see, in the place of emptiness, presence. I began to see not only the visible landscape but the invisible one, a landscape in which history, unrecorded and unremembered as it is, had transmuted itself into an always present spiritual dimension.

The Welsh were a god-cursed, stiff-necked, and utterly vexatious people, John said bitterly, but they did have an inexplicable ability to rise phoenixlike from the ashes of defeat, to soar upwards on wings too scorched for flight.

I once came upon a definition of history as 'the process by which complex truths are transformed into simplified falsehoods'. That is particularly true in the case of Richard III, where the normal medieval proclivity for moralizing and partisanship was further complicated by deliberate distortion to serve Tudor political needs.

At least it was never dull, my darling. And you will be remembered long after we've all turned to dust. But so will I.

Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.

For whatever reasons—which had never interested him in his youth but which he sometimes pondered as an adult—the Angevin House had always taken Cain and Abel as role models.

The book is Brittany and the Angevins: Province and Empire, 1158–1203, by Judith A. Everard

And what of those who didn't know him? What happens, too, when all who knew him are dead, when people know only what they've been told? What truth will we be talking about, then?

for each age interprets the past in the light of its own biases.

Poor Wales, so far from Heaven, so close to England!

Sharon Kay Penman

Between the two of us, we've got a family tree rooted in Hell!

The great Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote that once in a lifetime hope and history can rhyme. Evolution is what happens when history and change are in rhyme.

I used to wonder: Do only ignorant laypeople gaze on the colossal bust of Ramses II at the British Museum and ask themselves how it ended up there? Is it only the unschooled visitor who looks at the soaring column from the Temple of Artemis at the Met and questions why it exists in this place?

As once-colonized nations seek to stand on their own, the countries once denuded of their past seek to assert their independent identities through the objects that tie them to it. The demand for restitution is a way to reclaim history, to assert a moral imperative over those who were once overlords. Those countries still in the shadow of more powerful empires seek to claim the symbols of antiquity and colonialism to burnish their own national mythmaking.

History, in any case, cannot be reduced to some sort of game of comparing misdeeds in different eras; each period must be judged in itself and for its own successes and transgressions. The

but as an Indian, I find it far easier to forgive than to forget.

History belongs in the past; but understanding it is the duty of the present.

We literally paid for our own oppression.

Pakistan was created by Jinnah's will and Britain's willingness'—not by Nehru's wilfulness.

As I was typing this last sentence, somewhat hastily, my computer's spellcheck offered 'Brutish' as an acceptable substitute for 'British' rule in India!

I do not look to history to absolve my country of the need to do things right today. I seek to understand the wrongs of yesterday, both to grasp what has brought us to our present reality and to understand the past for itself.

flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother's crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.

The ISI may well be Pakistan's answer to the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy, Roman nor an empire: it