1,795 quotes found
“For indeed, what is more dire than the evils which today afflict the world? What is more terrible for the discerning than the unfolding events? What is more pitiable and frightening for those who e...”
“You can't really move forward until you look back.[From Remaking America panel discussion at George Washington University]”
“But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone shou...”
“The immense appetite we have for biography comes from a deep-seated sense of equality.”
“History is orphan. It can speak, but cannot hear. It can give, but cannot take. Its wounds and tragedies can be read and known, but cannot be avoided or cured.”
“In the last analysis, the essential thing is the life of individual. This alone makes history, here alone do the great transformations take place, and the whole future, the whole history of the wor...”
“It is indeed the duty of historians to stress the contrast betweenthe standards of the past and the standards of the present. Somefulfil that duty on purpose, others by accident.”
“...In our days many men have lived in this cruel manner, crushed against the bottom, but each for a relatively short period; so that we can perhaps ask ourselves if it is necessary or good to retai...”
“...neither life nor history is an enterprise for those who seek simplicity and consistency.”
“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”
“When he asked if she was okay, her eyes welled with tears and she said, Like Im always telling my brothers, if you gonna go into history, you cant do it with a hate attitude. You got to remember, t...”
“Another thing is, people lose perspective. It is a cultural trait in America to think in terms of very short time periods. My advice is: learn history. Take responsibility for history. Recognise th...”
“To write history one must be more than a man, since the author who holds the pen of this great justiciary must be free from all preoccupation of interest or vanity.”
“We will never cease our critique of those persons who distort the past, rewrite it, falsify it, who exaggerate the importance of one event and fail to mention some other; such a critique is proper ...”
“History isn't the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It's more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious or defeated.”
“you live through . . . that little piece of time that is yours, but that piece of time is not only your own life, it is the summing-up of all the other lives that are simultaneous with yours. It is...”
“The pathway traced with blood and tears,and dust of all our father's dead,Whose backward footsteps, wandering, red,Fade to the mist of nameless years.(The Testimony of the Suns)”
“Its quite certain there are places to which the whole past is as though attached, on which are traced in secret letters for people who are centuries removed from us their thoughts, their will”
“The city which lay below was a charnel house built on multi-layered bones centuries older than those which lay beneath the cities of Hamburg or Dresden. Was this knowledge part of the mystery it he...”
“History is a people's memory, and without a memory, a man is demoted to the lower animals.”
