Quotes About History

This Second Century appeals to me because it was the last century, for a very long period of time, in which men could think and express themselves with full freedom. As for us, we are perhaps already very far from such times as that.

De nog in de duistere schoot van de tijd liggende eeuwen zouden bij duizendtallen over dat graf heen gaan zonder hem het bestaan terug te geven, maar ook zonder iets aan zijn dood toe te voegen, zonder te beletten dat hij had geleefd.

The prevailing taste of the public for anecdote has been censured and ridiculed by critics, who aspire to the character of superior wisdom: but if we consider it in a proper point of view, this taste is an incontestible proof of the good sense and profoundly philosophic temper of the present times. Of the numbers who study, or at least who read history, how few derive any advantage from their labors!

because the past had shaped the present, it was more important than the present

Not to know what happened before you were born is always to remain a child. For what is a man's life if it is not linked with the life of future generations by memories of the past?

The truth is that we have done far too little, for we have never apologized. We have never fully, publicly acknowledged the evil that was done to African-Americans as evil. The Civil War obliterated a wicked institution, but a war alone cannot obliterate wicked thinking. Slavery ended but racism continued, and in many ways it intensified after that war. Slavery existed only in the South, but racism pervades the entire country.

If we really desire a moral answer to the Holocaust, we do everything in our power to create a world in which it could never happen again. As

Life is deep, but our current politics is shallow. The history of this country is like the stuff of great art and philosophy, while our current politics is more on the level of gossip magazines. It is shallow and tawdry, an unworthy vehicle for grappling with the meaning of what we are going through. We need to think more deeply if we're to create more powerfully. We need to focus on a broader understanding of the American story and commit ourselves to rewriting it.

From abolitionists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists here in America, to the international effort of the Allied forces during World War II and the team that rescued the boys in Thailand, the world has seen what happens when collective efforts dedicated to justice, peace, democracy, and love overcome forces that mitigate against them. History has shown what fear can do, but it has also shown us what love can do.

Archaeological evidence now argues for the existence of a twenty-thousand-year period of history when men and women lived as equals, with neither sex dominating the other. The earth flourished. The so-called feminine qualities of compassion, nurturing, and nonviolence were shared by men and women alike and were the most vital elements of social structure. Women were revered as priestesses and healers.

America will not move forward into a new era of greatness unless we atone for the militaristic madness that has gripped our country in the years since World War II. We fought that war because we needed to.

The creative spirit thrives on freedom and daring. Many of history's most creative women have not been married. As for the priestesses of olden times, don't even think about it. Priestesses were spiritual mermaids, and a lot of men were drowning.

Dowered with great historic names which they almost despise, they do their best to drag the memory of their ancient lineage into dishonour by vulgar passions, low tastes, and a scorn as well as lack of true intelligence. Let us not talk of them. The English aristocracy was once a magnificent tree, but its broad boughs are fallen,--lopped off and turned into saleable timber,--and there is but a decaying stump of it left.

We don't have anything like that here. War masks and so on.

Thus capitalism, which elevated patriarchy by turning its major value, power, into the only value, also destabilized it by enabling women for the first time in history to become economically independent.

Though I loved the wired world, the new-wave librarians, the avatars and activists, I turned into a dinosaur in that library. I couldn't help it; I was an old-fashioned writer who loved the ancient books summoned via pneumatic tubes, the archives, the quiet. I had found something rare there: an inexhaustible wonder.

bone grease with dried meat and berries to make pemmican, the energy bars of a thousand years ago, and with a pouch of pemmican, the Native Americans were good to travel far and wide. (If you can't pack portable food, you spend most of your time hunting and foraging).

A library is a place to go for a reality check, a bracing dose of literature, or a true reflection of our history, whether it's a brick-and-mortar building constructed a century ago or a fanciful arrangement of computer codes. The librarian is the organizer, the animating spirit behind it, and the navigator. Her job is to create order out of the confusion of the past, even as she enables us to blast into the future.

The convention that there were two sides to every story eliminated the third and fourth and fifth sides. Even dividing the past two and a half million years into the "Neolithic" (the new stone age) and the "Paleolithic" (the old stone age) was reductionist. "Write this down," he said. "Dichotomies are for idiots.

Place is not the background of archaeology—it's the point. As any archaeologist will tell you, context is everything.

All lives are stories, and history is made of stories.

In eternity this world will be like Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

Every single one of us is a little civilization built on the ruins of any number of preceding civilizations, but with our own variant notions of what is beautiful and what is acceptable - which, I haste to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

If the Lord chooses to make nothing of our transgressions, then they are nothing. Or whatever reality they have is trivial and conditional beside the exquisite primary fact of existence. Of course the Lord would wipe them away, just as I wipe dirt from your face, or tears. After all, why should the Lord bother much over these snitches that are no part of His Creation? Well, there are a good many reasons why He should. We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.