Quotes About History

Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx.

A society is moving toward dangerous ground when loyalty to the truth is seen as disloyalty to some supposedly higher interest. How many times has history taught us this?

Fingerbone was never an impressive town. It was chastened by an outsized landscape and extravagant weather and chastened again by an awareness that the whole of human history had occurred elsewhere.

Another factor that seems to me to be equally important is the great myth and rationale of 'the modern,' that it places dynamite at the foot of old error and levels its shrines and monuments. Contempt for the past surely accounts for a consistent failure to consult it.

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 hasten to add, we generally do not satisfy and by which we struggle to live.

I think that in our earlier history--the Gettysburg Address or something--there was the conscious sense that democracy was an achievement. It was not simply the most efficient modern system or something. It was something that people collectively made and they understood that they held it together by valuing it.

Let us say, as a thought experiment, that someone in a country equipped with doomsday weapons fears attack from another country and strikes preemptively. There would be thousands of years of cultural history and some few decades of personal history behind the decision. Madman though he might be, he would have brought the species to a culmination that humankind had been preparing for eons. To say that a spasm of activity in a region of his brain was crucial to the event would be utterly trivial.

I am not the first to suggest that anthropology arose in Western thought in an inauspicious period, one characterized by colonialism and so-called racial science. But I seem to be more or less alone in my conviction that, in all its primitivity, this anthropology continues to color the ways in which we conceive of human nature.

We human beings do real harm. History could make a stone weep.

Perhaps the worst thing about ideological thinking is that it implies a structure in and behind events, a history that is reiterative, with variations that cannot ultimately change the course of things and are therefore always trivial, no matter how much thought and labor goes into the making of them.

That there have been wars I have no doubt. I believe that plague was a great sign to us, and we refused to see it and take its meaning, and since then we have had war continuously.

When someone remarked in his hearing that he had lost an eye in the Civil War, he said "I prefer to remember that I have kept one.

In America, since we are an immigrant country, our "nativists" may be first- or second-generation Americans whose parents or grandparents were themselves considered suspect on these same grounds. It is almost as interesting as it is disheartening to learn that nativist rhetoric can have impact in a country where precious few can claim to be native in any ordinary sense.

we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations

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

it is true that we all do live in the ruins of the lives of other generations, so there is a seeming continuity which is important because it deceives us.

When I asked [her maternal grandmother that lived to the age of 103] what she remembered about the First and Second World Wars, she told me the following: "Germans are very correct. The Italians always look for a piano and want to make a party. But when the Russians come, everyone runs away because they rape all the women, young and old alike.

Even though it is almost impossible to attribute with certainty any specific mathematical achievements either to Pythagoras himself or to his followers, there is no question that they have been responsible for a mingling of mathematics, philosophy of life, and religion unparalleled in history. In this respect it is perhaps interesting to note the historical coincidence that Pythagoras was a contemporary of Buddha and Confucius.

Your enemies always get strong on what you leave behind.

If anything in this life is certain...if history has taught us anything, it's that you cn kill anyone.

what is written on paper affects history. But not life. Life is a different history.

Ah, Sicily, Sicily, he thought, you destroy your best and bring them to dust.

Con dogmáticos o con inteligentes, el Perú estará siempre jodido —dijo Carlitos—. Este país empezó mal y acabará mal. Como nosotros, Zavalita.

Eso era la historia, una rama de la fabulación que pretendía ser ciencia.