History Quotes

“I want you to write like Alice Munro.  Stir the world.  Make people see the horror; show them their suffering relatives; show them that they’re not safe.  Let them know that they can’t even begin to imagine what’s happening here.  By making my reality more compelling than reality television is the only way you’ll get their attention.
Psychotic and cynical.
Who can tell the difference anymore between a severed head and a special effect?  Can you?  I doubt it, and I know you’ve been in the middle of it all and seen the damage first-hand.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“She polished her words like smooth river rocks lying perfectly organized in brilliant rainbow shades under crystal clear, slow moving water.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“Frank Churchill was waiting for her when she arrived. He had now been a convenient sixth with their party on multiple occasions, escorting Jane following the Campbells and Dixons, and it seemed so natural as he greeted them and slipped into place as they entered the hall. “Have a care, you are sparkling tonight,” he murmured under his breath. “Almost as if you had recently become engaged to the love of your life.”
Jane did not dare look at him as she smiled. If she did, the entire world would know their secret.”
― Jeanette Watts, My Dearest Miss Fairfax

“This is one of the wonders of books: the delight of being a species that can chronicle and preserve. I pick up a book from a shelf, and someone who is no more than ash or bone can still change me.”
― Robin Ince, Bibliomaniac: An Obsessive's Tour of the Bookshops of Britain

“Kind of like ignoring history. You can try, but it'll probably bite you in the ass later.”
― Sequoia Nagamatsu, How High We Go in the Dark

“In his letters to Olmsted, Riotte also delineated, with keen transatlantic insight, a divide that he felt had doomed their efforts from the start. "We are judged from the standpoint of an American-indeed a very strange people!" he wrote.

Riotte and his ilk viewed society "as a congregation of men; whose aim it is to elevate the wellbeing of the aggregate by the combined exertion." Americans, by contrast, "look first upon themselves as private individuals, entitled to ask for all the rights and benefits of an organized community even to the detriment of the whole.... We idealize the community-you the individual! How is it possible, that we ever should amalgamate?"

Riotte closed by praising Olmsted's writing on the South but expressed doubt that it would diminish the Slave Power. "I don't know of any histori- cal record of an Aristocracy giving up their privileges, except in the case of revolutionary pressure.”
― Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

“Western Texas was just such a project: a grandiose scheme, germinated in secret, and unlikely to bear fruit for years. As laid out in private correspondence with Adolf Douai and other co-conspirators in Texas, the plan called for the "immigration of one or two thousand staunch and steadfast northern men, supporters of Freedom." These infiltrators should come quietly and in small groups at first, forming a "nucleus" in alliance with free- state Germans. Thereafter, migrants from the North and Europe would "pour in," aided by new railroad lines.

Olmsted kept refining and expanding on this plan, long after his return from Texas. It became, in effect, a dry run for his career as a landscape architect, including blueprints for a string of planned communities across the frontier of the Cotton Kingdom.

"I have a private grand political hobby which I must display to you," he disclosed to a Northern ally, in a letter filled with geometric shapes, lines, and arrows. The sketch was nothing less than a sweeping design for winning what Olmsted called the "war between the power of Slavery and of Freedom on this continent.”
― Tony Horwitz, Spying on the South: An Odyssey Across the American Divide

“AND I ALWAYS THOUGHT
And I always thought: the very simplest words
must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone's heart must be torn to shreds.
That you'll go down if you don't stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.”
― Bertold Brecht

“History is written by all sorts, victors, losers and neutral observers. Cliches are written by all sorts as well.”
― Unknownimous

“History is Gothic in the narratives of Irish America because the undead Irish past replays within America's contexts of race.”
― Mary M Burke

“The United States of America is built on African slavery and Indigenous genocide. This simple fact is the premise from which any honest study of American history must begin.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“The emergence of reason and the subsequent reification of reason as the fundamental attribute of human nature is therefore completely premised on the creation of hierarchies of reasonable and unreasonable peo-ple. The enlightened, reasoned man can only exist in distinction to the (African, Indigenous, nonmale) person who lacks reason; the idea of universal humanity is premised on human difference from and opposition to the less- or nonhuman person, a racialized and racializing difference.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“It is history's only duty, Lia thought: ensuring daughters are brighter than their mothers.”
― Maddie Mortimer, Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies

“there is a sense in which literacy actually distorts the archeological record, for while it illuminates the centers of civilization, it makes the darkness surrounding even darker.”
― N.K. Sandars, The Sea Peoples: Warriors of the Ancient Mediterranean 1250-1150 BC (Ancient Peoples & Places)

“How do you know how you are if you wear the same things as before?” she asked. "You have to shake your life until you rid yourself of everything you thought you were. You will shiver during the transition and then replenish with non-identity. After that, you’ll see clearly. What does that mean? Well, you may have to move out of this country. Build your closet from the ground up. Befriend those you despise. Take a left. Trade different things, you see? One must refresh themselves. Stay current with the needs of our soul.”

“The adventure isn’t real though... like, people don’t actually do those things. It’s very romantic, but it’s not true. People don’t actually do that.”

“What in the world? Do you know your history? We are anything– anything!—we are... in medieval times, kings would behead their brothers. Rulers would commission the most talented artists in the world to paint their bathroom ceilings. People have defeated mammoths with sticks. People have loved. People have killed the innocent to hurt the guilty. Waited until dawn. Mocked death. Staged coup d'états. Go further in your emotions and convictions. Increase your tolerance for extremity. Life can stretch.”

“I think you’re mad,” giggled Andrei, shifting his feet.

“Like a comet,” she stared with a firm jaw.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“Si notre capacité à tirer profit de notre expérience et à en retenir les leçons était décisive, nous aurions oublié depuis longtemps ce qu'est la guerre. Mais aucune expérience, aucune analogie n'est parvenue à empêcher ceux qui veulent la guerre de la faire, et il en sera toujours ainsi.”
― Andrzej Sapkowski, Le Sang des elfes

“History is history, and there's no use tryin' to sweep it under the rug.”
― "Earl Smooter" - SWEET HOME ALABAMA 2002

“Persistence used to be his goal; perhaps, he once believed, if he endured more days, eventually life would come together, either ultimately or through a single event. Books and art and politics said to keep going. But while persistence was other men’s answer, their conflicts were not his. How could a man totally trust history’s advice when today, the sparrow breaks its old route and flies over that jacaranda tree and not the usual? Persistence was not Andrei’s answer. He needed deviation.”
― Karl Kristian Flores, A Happy Ghost

“The aim of a great radio network, like that of a fine newspaper or magazine should be to integrate the disparate events and ides around us into accessible, regular programming: not just the classy events and elegant ideas, not just the natural concerns of aesthetics and charitable worthies. The result should be a mix of wordsin which those listeners who ne er read Call it Sleep might sense an invitation to do so and ... capture the voice of Noah Adams captured in Northern Ireland ...”
― Robert Siegel

“A person without even knowledge of the history becomes history.”
― Tamerlan Kuzgov

“My name is Joe Ward, from Gunnocks, Clonee, in County Meath. I have been asked to put down my recollections of the last two generations of the Ward family and the people who worked with them. . . . I have no qualifications for writing, other than a good memory. I will write these articles the same way as I talk: short, factual and to the point. Most of the events of which I will speak took place before the year I was born, 1909.”
― Ciarann Buckley & Chris Ward

“To those who have said, "Be patient and wait," we must say that we cannot be patient. We do not want our freedom gradually, but we want to be free now.”
― Brad Meltzer; John Lewis

“Each age wants to see its heroes in its own image, in ways that reflect the pieties and sentiments of its day.”
― Robert Morgan, Boone: A Biography

“But now we are ready to show the world the importance of living in a democracy that welcomes everyone because we have to stop amplifying our perceived differences and embrace our shared humanity.”
― Helene Munson, Hitler’s Boy Soldiers: How My Father’s Generation Was Trained to Kill and Sent to Die for Germany

“Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.”
― Dalia Ofer

“Adams was not quite an “ordinary” woman; she was an academic who engaged in a public exchange of views with a Jewish woman and who actively combated Nazism. But she was ordinary in that she was one of the growing number of women who, from 1930 on, voted for the Nazis, and her motives apparently resembled those of most Nazi voters: they voted for the party not because they agreed with everything the Nazis said but as a protest against the government in power.”
― Gisela Bock

“History is history. It's something to learn from, not repeat.”
― K. Weikel, When Dead Men Bleed

“فتحت عينيها و نظرت الي اطراف اصابعها : كانت مبللة ، مبللة بالدم . حمراء من الدم . وضعت يدها امام وجه الرجل الغائب "انظر !هذا دمي دائما ،نظيف . بين دم حيضي و الدم النظيف ، مالفرق ؟ ماهو الشئ المقزز في هذا الدم ؟" . تنزل يدها لتصبح علي مقربة من انف الرجل "لقد ولدت من هذا الدم ! انه أنظف من الدم الذي يسري في عروقك !”
― عتيق رحيمي, The Patience Stone

“Frederick Douglass spent some of his bondage working as a ship caulker in Baltimore and, like many others, deceived his enslaver about how much he was actually making, thus secreting funds for his escape. Many of these workers lived miles distant from their enslavers- indeed, it is precisely these urban communities of relatively independent Black people that would lead to the earliest development of police departments, as gangs of slave catchers evolved into formalized slave patrols designed to keep these "slave quarters" under surveillance and control.”
― Vicky Osterweil, In Defense of Looting: A Riotous History of Uncivil Action

“. . . historians rarely emphasize the tremendous importance that [Marie Antoinette's] public attached to what she was wearing at each step along the way.”
― Caroline Weber, Queen of Fashion: What Marie Antoinette Wore to the Revolution