History Quotes

“Humanism is the only - I would go so far as saying the final- resistance we have against the inhuman practices and injustices that disfigure human history.”
― Edward W. Said

“Fear has always been a very important whistleblower. Our emotion and our history can provoke fear that may arrest us at any time or at any place. Above and beyond, fear might be contagious and its scent, sometimes sensual, sometimes mystical or animal, can exude the musty and arcane smell of destiny. ("One could still feel the smell of fear" )”
― Erik Pevernagie

“Every period of human development has had its own particular type of human conflict—its own variety of problem that, apparently, could be settled only by force. And each time, frustratingly enough, force never really settled the problem. Instead, it persisted through a series of conflicts, then vanished of itself—what's the expression—ah, yes, 'not with a bang, but a whimper,' as the economic and social environment changed. And then, new problems, and a new series of wars.”
― Isaac Asimov, I, Robot

“We are all, Esme decides, just vessels through which identities pass: we are lent features, gestures, habits, then we hand them on. Nothing is our own. We begin in the world as anagrams of our antecedents.”
― Maggie O'Farrell, The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox

“History is just a way of keeping score, but it doesn't have to be who we are.”
― Shaun David Hutchinson, We Are the Ants

“To survive,
Let the past
Teach you--
Past customs,
Struggles,
Leaders and thinkers.
Let
These
Help you.
Let them inspire you,
Warn you,
Give you strength.
But beware:
God is Change.
Past is past.
What was
Cannot
Come again.

To survive,
know the past.
Let it touch you.
Then let
The past
Go.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents

“When history is written as it ought to be written, it is the moderation and long patience of the masses at which men will wonder, not their ferocity.”
― C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution

“When the tyrant has disposed of foreign enemies by conquest or treaty and there is nothing to fear from them then he is always stirring up some wary or other in order that the people may require a leader.”
― Plato

“Maeve O’Shaughnessy was one of those Americans, influenced by national hero and Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh, who had been against becoming involved in the war.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Jimmy’s dog tag clinked as he almost slid right into her. Teenagers wore dog tags in case New York was bombed and they needed to be identified if killed or injured. Mrs. McCorkle, the O’Shaughnessy’s immediate next door neighbor, had insisted on a dog tag for Jimmy.”
― A.G. Russo, O'SHAUGHNESSY INVESTIGATIONS, INC.: The Cases Nobody Wanted

“Written twenty years after she held office, this abridged biography is being released now, prior to taking place.

Maybe we can learn from history before it happens.”
― Nancy Omeara, The Most Popular President Who Ever Lived [So Far]

“The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history... It seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.”
― Rachel Carson

“The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.”
― Noam Chomsky, Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World

“I knew I was alone in a way that no earthling has ever been before.”
― Michael Collins

“We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way.”
― Stephen Jay Gould

“If we could learn to look instead of gawking,
We'd see the horror in the heart of farce,
If only we could act instead of talking,
We wouldn't always end up on our arse.
This was the thing that nearly had us mastered;
Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men!
Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard,
The bitch that bore him is in heat again.”
― Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

“He’d used the amulet to read my thoughts again.
I pictured smacking him in the face.”
― Priya Ardis, Ever My Merlin

“There is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism.”
― Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History

“History has rewritten itself so many times I'm not really sure how it was to begin with -- it's a bit like trying to guess the original color of a wall when it's been repainted eight times.”
― Jasper Fforde, Something Rotten

“Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ”
― Foucault Michel

“We have inherited a fear of memories of slavery. It is as if to remember and acknowledge slavery would amount to our being consumed by it. As a matter of fact, in the popular black imagination, it is easier for us to construct ourselves as children of Africa, as the sons and daughters of kings and queens, and thereby ignore the Middle Passage and centuries of enforced servitude in the Americas. Although some of us might indeed be the descendants of African royalty, most of us are probably descendants of their subjects, the daughters and sons of African peasants or workers.”
― Angela Davis

“There’s a fine line between gossip and history, when one is talking about kings.”
― Michelle Cooper, A Brief History of Montmaray

“So the story of man runs in a dreary circle, because he is not yet master of the earth that holds him.”
― Will Durant

“Once people said: Give me liberty or give me death. Now they say: Make me a slave, just pay me enough.”
― Todd Garlington

“I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn’t saunter. He didn’t amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.”
― Priya Ardis, Ever My Merlin

“Tyranny is Tyranny, let it come from whom it may.”
― Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States: 1492 - Present

“The problem with bearing fanatical witness to this kind of human depravity is that ambiguity and contradiction easily overwhelm the nuance required for understanding.  There seems to me that no logic applies to our time of terror, as if it were a dream.  There was no lapse of incoherence; none of it was incomprehensible; our shared pain was not sensible then and unexplainable afterwards.  It was actually all too real all the time, and we were simply trying to navigate an uncertain passage through it in search of safety.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta

“The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them.”
― Sam Wineburg

“It was not the brutality of what occurred next that changed my mind and brought home to me the full meaning of fear. It was the brilliance of it.”
― Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian

“What was once a home she had taken apart one piece at a time, one day...She sold her belongings for money to buy food.  First the luxuries: a small statue, a picture.  Then the items with more utility: a lamp, a kettle.  Clothes left the closet at a rate of a garment a day…she burned everything in the basement first; then everything in the attic.  It lasted weeks, not months.  Though tempted, she left the roof alone.  She stripped the second floor, and the stairs.  She extracted every possible calorie from the kitchen.  she wasn’t working alone, because neighbourhood pirates simultaneously stole anything of value outside: door and window frames, fencing, stucco.  They pillaged her yard.  Breaking in was a boundary her neigbours had not yet crossed.  But the animals had.  Rats and mice and other vermin found the cracks without much effort.  Like her, they sought warmth and scraps of food.  With great reluctance, she roasted the ones she could catch.  She spent her nights fighting off the ones that escaped.”
― John Payton Foden, Magenta