Quotes About History

Woody Allen said that 95% of history is explained as a man trying to impress a woman. And that's true in my life.

Manchester's history is cotton and wool. Birmingham's is iron and steel.

When I was starting, there were wool mills in the U.S. that could make you anything. The U.S. used to produce the most beautiful cotton denim in the world. Now all that is gone.

Black people created punk - the band Death was way before The Ramones. Same with Bad Brains. If you think about it, the wool has been pulled over our eyes.

During my first semester of college, I raised my hand in a class and asked the professor to define a word I didn't know. The word was holocaust, and I had to ask because, until that moment, I had never heard of it.

I mean, where I come from, 'communism' is not a terrible word.

Totalitarianism is feudalism in the twelfth century sense of the word.

The people and the cultures of what is known as Africa are older than the word 'Africa.' According to most records, old and new, Africans are the oldest people on the face of the earth. The people now called Africans not only influenced the Greeks and the Romans, they influenced the early world before there was a place called Europe.

Is there no Latin word for Tea? Upon my soul, if I had known that I would have let the vulgar stuff alone.

In the Constitution of the United States, Negroes are referred to as fellows although the word 'slave' is carefully avoided before the thirteenth amendment.

Shah is a kind of magic word with the Persian people.

'WASP' is the only ethnic term that is in fact a term of class, apart from redneck, which is another word for the same group but who are in the lower social strata, so it's inexplicably tied up with social standing and culture and history in a way that the other hyphenations just are not.

Never in the history of 'The Shield' was the word 'LAPD' ever mentioned. We would mention districts, like Wilshire and Hollenbeck and Marina, but Farmington was a fictitious district, and we never actually uttered the word 'LAPD.' So that was sort of the deal we made with them.

Vexillography is a very big word! Vexillography is really the high science and art and understanding of flags and their history - the academic word for flag making and heraldry.

We didn't exist. Ronald Reagan didn't say the word 'AIDS' until 1987. I've tried desperately to get a meeting in the White House; Gay Men's Health Crisis is already an established organization. I have a certain presence.

Magna Carta only came into being in 1217, when the wording had been changed and parts of the original were extended in the Charter of the Forests. This complementary charter covered liberties granted to the common man, including rights to the commons, grazing, fishing, water, and firewood, and was perhaps the first ecological charter in history.

The most powerful words in English are 'Tell me a story,' words that are intimately related to the complexity of history, the origins of language, the continuity of the species, the taproot of our humanity, our singularity, and art itself.

If you look at Mormonism, it's a very appealing community. It takes care of itself; there are active charities. It's got a successful work ethic. Whatever you might think about the authenticity of their theology or their history, it's immaterial in terms of how the religion itself actually functions.

I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.

Life doesn't just happen; it's constructed through the history of power. And that's something I am interested in and so is the art world: a world that's trying to engage socially, with a leftist slant, to work out how we got here.

I think that to a very great extent we are partners with the divine in this enterprise called history. That is an ongoing relationship, and there is absolutely no guarantee that things will automatically work out to our best advantage.

One might have thought that 70 years was time enough to work out what really happened in 1939. It isn't the case. Misunderstandings and misinformation abound.

I love studying folklore and legends. The stories that people passed down for a thousand years without any sort of marketing support are obviously saying something appealing about the basic human condition.

We must teach our people the greatness of China's historical culture. In our educational program we must stress Chinese history and geography so that all may know and appreciate China's civilization of five thousand years and the far-flung boundaries of our ancient race. This will engender a greater faith in our own future.