Quotes About History

That did it. With his masculine pride completely trampled beneath her sturdy and practical heel, Jack made a vow. The moment this ends, I am going straight up to London to cut a swath through Society that will ensure my place in history alongside Casanova and every other great rake. There won't be a woman's heart safe from my charms.

How can any child grope its way through life if its parents or guardians tear up all the pages of the past?

The history of the past is but one long struggle upward to equality.

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her.

The prolonged slavery of women is the darkest page in human history.

It was just so in the American Revolution, in 1776, the first delicacy the men threw overboard in Boston harbor was the tea, woman's favorite beverage. The tobacco and whiskey, though heavily taxed, they clung to with the tenacity of the devil-fish.

We are both what time has wrought of us

Bishops of Rouen, Fécamp and Jumièges. A

While writing The Summer Queen, I was constantly told that Alienor was a "woman ahead of her time." But my own take is that she was a woman of her time doing her best within the boundaries of what society would permit. Any attempt to go outside those boundaries was immediately and sometimes brutally quashed, but she was nothing if not resilient. I

had the feeling that I was a historical fragment, an excerpt for which the preceding and succeeding text was missing…. I could well imagine that I might have lived in former centuries and there encountered questions I was not yet able to answer; that I had to be born again because I had not fulfilled the task that was given to me. —CARL JUNG

Our national problem has not been ignoring the Civil War, but turning it into a kind of theme park in which nostalgia and mendacity have eclipsed the raw and unpleasant truth that one army fought, and lost, a battle for the liberty to enslave other human beings, while the other, full of imperfect men fighting for a variety of motives, secured the emancipation of those human beings and thereby preserved a political experiment underwritten by the idea of equality.

The whistle now resides at the Pratt Institute but used to blow the shift changes at Bethlehem Steel;

The antebellum embrace of Manifest Destiny committed many Americans to an ideal: a country without a past.

It is important to remember now, amid all this debris, how frightened we used to be.

Having bought furniture for my own house, and bought furniture for our house in Washington, a furniture store seemed like a good idea, and it also played into my personal history.

I knew that my parents were civil rights partisans. I was proud of the night my father had spent in jail in the 1950s, arrested and charged with "inciting to riot." He and a buddy had stood on a front porch in a white part of town, trying to protect the new black homeowners within from a rock-throwing mob on the lawn. It seemed the Jewish thing to do.

His expression was suddenly serious as the tip of his finger traced her lips. "I never understood why history is filled with stories of men who waged wars over a woman they loved. There are many women in the world, and it was beyond my grasp what made one woman special enough to go to such extremes." He pressed a kiss to her forehead. "Now I understand.

But after he tells you how they died, I want you to remember how they lived(...)

I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?

Now, if you are like me - if you are like practically anybody in America - then you probably hold some negative opinions about the French, based upon movies, rumors, recent headlines, unfortunate run-ins with Parisian waiters, or... you know... all that unpleasantness surrounding the Vichy regime.

I met an old lady once, almost a hundred years old, and she told me, 'There are only two questions that human beings have ever fought over, all through history. How much do you love me? And Who's in charge?

History produces not only the forces of domination but also the forces of resistance that press up against and are often the objects of such domination. Which is another way of saying that history, the past, is larger than the present, and is the ever-growing and ongoing possibility of resistance to the present's imposed values, the possibility of futures not unlike the present, futures that resist and transform what dominates the present.

But mostly I'm just respectful of old ways. I believe things for a reason, and in the old days they did things for a reason. And if you don't understand why—well, you might end up opening a few doors better left closed. That's all.

Memories represent power to people who are oppressed, for while they cannot control much of what occurs in their lives, they can own their own memories.