Quotes About History

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban ' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway.

If you don't believe in ghosts, you've never been to a family reunion.

Keep some souvenirs of your past, or how will you ever prove it wasn't all a dream?

I've walked a long trail, a long trail of years flushed with tears. Tears of remembrance. Years of driven labor have not driven the ancestral thoughts out of me. My memory of teaching— surrounded by children, singing songs of our people, the stories of our history— lives always with me... Song shields our hearts from abuse, draws us together, strengthens our lives.

But the world turned, and it changed, and eventually all tyrants fell to become dust.

They'd had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband's, her children's, and now their children's in turn - echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.

All cultures must be judged in relation to their own history, and all individuals and groups in relation to their cultural history, and definitely not by the arbitrary standard of any single culture.

I had grown up believing the slaves hadn't fought back. I remember feeling ashamed when they talked about slavery in school.

I wondered how i would feel going into some museum and seeing the houses and stolen artifacts of my people stuck away in some exhibition hall. As i spoke i realized that most of the "history" i had been taught about the Indians was probably lies invented by the white man.

It wasn't until later, for instance, that i learned that scalping was an old European custom.

The more i watched how boys and girls behaved, the more i read and the more i thought about it, the more convinced i became that this behavior could be traced directly back to the plantation, when slaves were encouraged to take the misery of their lives out on each other instead of on the master. The slavemasters taught us we were ugly, less than human, unintelligent, and many of us believed it. Black people became breeding animals: studs and mares.

Every day there were three shifts of police. When they changed shifts, the two troopers would salute the sergeant. Some saluted an army salute, but others saluted like the nazis did in Germany. They held their hands in front of them and clicked their heels.

Northern whites were more than happy at the prospect of Black people fighting in the war. A popular verse published in the newspapers of the day reflected the sentiment of many Northerners: Some say it is a burnin' shame To make the naygurs fight An' that the trade o' bein' kilt Belongs but to the white; But as for me upon me sowl, So liberal are we here, I'll let Sambo be murthered in place o' meself On every day in the year.

When the draft law was enacted, tens of thousands of white workers in New York City took to the streets and brutally beat and murdered every Black person they could find. It has been estimated that between four hundred and a thousand Blacks were killed as a result of the so-called New York draft law riots. Draft riots and the murder of Blacks also took place in other Northern cities.

The trial began on January 17, 1977, the same day Gary Gilmore was shot in Utah. Gary Gilmore was the first person legally executed since the death penalty was struck down by the u.s. supreme kourt in the early 1970s. His execution set the climate for the trial.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has gotten their freedom, by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them

The clocks are ticking my friends. History has got a strict timetable. If we're not careful we might be remembered as the country who arrived to late.

We have to forget the past. History is something that even today we are paying the consequences, and the future is integration. We all as a people, as citizens, as the leadership of both countries should be looking in that direction.

I've always been homeschooled, so doing it on set is kind of the same thing. My mom makes it very interactive - we'll get a book on chocolate and learn how to make it, or she will buy antique items. I love military history, the mechanics and strategy of it.

People enter politics or the Civil Service out of a desire to exert power and influence events; this, I maintain, is an illness. It's only when one realises that great administrators and leaders of men have all been at any rate slightly mad that one has a true understanding of history.

A thorough knowledge of the past could lead a profound scholar to predict the future course of history with great accuracy, provided that it did not turn out quite differently.

It's a struggle but that's why we exist, so that another generation of Lesbians of color will not have to invent themselves, or their history, all over again.

It was probable that the widow knew more than others suspected of insanity in the Buchenau family, for there was an unsolved mystery lying half a century in the past, when Clara's uncle Hugo, a darkly moody man, had shot himself in an orchard one May morning, scattering his brains among the blossoms, and soon after, Clara's father had sunk into a deep depression and had at last to be taken to Mendota as insane, and there died.

Jazz in itself is not struggling. That is, the music itself is not struggling... It's the attitude that's in trouble. My plays insist that we should not forget or toss away our history.