1,795 quotes found
“…little people like me have to keep the true story alive. That way, when the revolution ends, and people come looking for the history, we can say, ‘Here it is – we kept it for you.”
“History is always a grand fantasy... To reconstruct is to invent.”
“Nothing is final in history. It always moves on. Peace must be built again and again.”
“There is no creature so perfect in wisdom and knowledge but may learn something for time present, and to come, by times past.”
“Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.”
“History is fiction.”
“Yankee Stadium, it’s like everything else in this country. In Europe, they save all their old buildings for history. Here, we just tear them all down.”
“The expression 'there is nothing like the good old days' does not mean that fewer bad things happened before, but fortunately, that people tend to forget about them.”
“History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn’t change where you were from. But still, you didn’t have to stay there. You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatli...”
“But it is no use to justify yourself. It is no good to explain. It is weak to be anecdotal. It is wise to conceal the past even if there is nothing to conceal. A man's power is in the half-light, i...”
“If somebody tells you ‘History will never forgive you,’ just laugh at him! Because when the history comes, you won’t be here! The threat of history never forgives you is a useless threat!”
“My first reaction, every time I delve into an episode of history that I don’t know very much about, is anger that my teachers never taught me about it.”
“What I want to know is, in the Middle Ages, did they do anything for Housemaid's Knee? What did they put in their hot baths after jousting?”
“What you don’t know going in is that when you come out, you will be scarred for life. Whether you were in for a week, a month, or a year—even if you come home without a scratch—you are never, ever ...”
“Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a ...”
“Tesla,” the vicar mused. “That’s a foreign name, is it not? Hungarian,is it?”“Serbian,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid the ——shire Teslas are ascant three centuries in these parts, having constructed...”
“One cannot launch a new history — the idea is altogether unthinkable; there would not be the continuity and tradition. Tradition cannot be contrived or learned. In its absence one has, at the best,...”
“The historic atmosphere was there, certainly; but the historic atmosphere, scientifically considered, was no better than a villainous miasma”
“In inventing [General Juan Manuel de] Rosas’ self-justification, I have taken the liberty of drawing almost exclusively on the words of Tony Blair, and the various self-justifications he produced t...”
“One of history’s most useful tasks is to bring home to us how keenly, honestly and painfully, past generations pursued aims that now seem to us wrong or disgraceful.”
