Quotes About History

ruled Pakistan directly for a majority of the years of its existence

You and I are ancient history, and nothing will change the fact you turned out to be an asshat whose best talent lies between the sheets.

For the first time in history, a major assault was launched by commanders whose eyes were fixed on the hands of watches synchronized the night before.

They played the things Duff had learned while crouching under Bantam Street windows, the old songs that had been great before some of the boys were born, things never set down on paper but kept alive in places and in memories such as these.

In the end these efforts at postponing the issue of slavery failed. The Civil War put in doubt the capability of free politics to keep up with an expanded scale. The proof was in the failure of postwar Reconstruction: despite military occupation democracy and racial equality failed to take hold in the South.

Unlike scientific truths, which are cumulative and frequently superseded, archaisms are fixed, impervious to evidence. What is the doctrine of "the framers' original intent" and "constitutional originalism" but a variant of creationism and the denial of historical evolution

Recent history takes a while to set. People really don't know what just happened. They only figure it out later.

We Indians really should be better liars, considering how often we've been lied to.

My school and my tribe are so poor and sad that we have to study from the same dang books our parents studied from. That is absolutely the saddest thing in the world.

I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during the first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else.

There are family mysteries I cannot solve. There are family mysteries I am unwilling to solve.

Well of course man. We Indians have lost everything. We lost our native land, we lost our languages, we lost our songs and dances. We lost each other. We only know how to lose and be lost.

I didn't literally kill Indians. We were supposed to make you give up being Indian. Your songs and stories and language and dancing. Everything. We weren't trying to kill Indian people. We were trying to kill Indian culture.

it's like this white-Indian thing has gotten out of control. And the thing with the blacks and the Mexicans. Everybody blaming everybody...I don't know what happened. I can't explain it all. Just look around at the world. Look at this country. Things just aren't like they used to be.' 'Son, things have never been like what you think they used to be.

My parents came from poor people who came from poor people who came from poor people, all the way back to the very first poor people.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I could write "I don't know" one million times and publish that as my memoir. And, yes, it would be repetitive, experimental, and more metaphor than history, but it would also be emotionally accurate.

I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during that first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shooting Indians. So I'm never quite sure why we eat turkey like everybody else. "Hey, Dad," I said. "What do Indians have to be so thankful for?" "We should give thanks that they didn't kill all of us.

More and more, he heard his spine playing stick games through his skin, singing old dusty words, the words of all his years.

Imagine Columbus landed in 1492 and some tribe or another drowned him in the ocean. Would Lester FallsApart still be shoplifting in the 7-11?

Being colonized automatically makes you bipolar.

Reservations were meant to be prisons, you know? Indians were supposed to move onto reservations and die. We were supposed to disappear.

The United States wants all of us to forget the crimes it committed against the indigenous. The United States wants us to forget. The United States wants us to forget. The United States wants us to forget.

A man doesn't grow up black in the USA without knowing a lot of crazy black folks, without being born to and giving birth to the breakable and broken.

Adam and Eve covered their privates with fig leaves; the first Indians covered their privates with their tiny hands.