History Quotes

“But you can learn a lot about history by figuring out what people wanted to hide.”
― Kim Hyun Sook, Banned Book Club

“When you're living in the middle of history, you never know what it means.”
― John Green, The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“During World War Two, troops were given meth pills to make them better soldiers: able to stay awake for long periods, with hyper-alert senses and an increased willingness to take risks”
― Angeline Boulley, Firekeeper’s Daughter

“History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential, because the historical evidence of change is so much more vivid.”
― Richard W. Wrangham, The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution

“With only rare exceptions, history shows that while strategy and bravery can win a battle, the frontiers of science and technology must be exploited to win a war.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson, Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military

“Not all of history is recorded in the books supplied to school children in Harlem or Birmingham. Yet this boy and this girl know something of the part of history which has been censored by the white writers and purchasers of board-of-education books. They know that Negroes were with George Washington at Valley Forge. They know that the first American to shed blood in the revolution which freed his country from British oppression was a black seaman named Crispus Attucks. The boy's Sunday-school teacher has told him that one of the team who designed the capital of their nation, Washington, D.C., was a Negro, Benjamin Banneker. Once the girl had heard a speaker, invited to her school during Negro History Week. This speaker told how, for two hundred years, without wages, black people, brought to this land in slave ships and in chains, had drained the swamps, built the homes, made cotton king and helped, on whip-lashed backs, to lift this nation from colonial obscurity to commanding influence in domestic commerce and world trade.

Wherever there was hard work, dirty work, dangerous work—in the mines, on the docks, in the blistering foundries—Negroes had done more than their share.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Let us not go back in anger or forward in fear, but around in awareness.”
― James Thurber

“In order to qualify as historical, an event must be susceptible to at least two narrations of its occurrence. Unless at least two versions of the same set of events can be imagined, there is no reason for the historian to take upon himself the authority of giving the true account of what really happened. The authority of the historical narrative is the authority of reality itself; the historical account endows the reality with form and thereby makes it desirable by the imposition upon its processes of the formal coherency that only stories possess.”
― Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation

“A Magnum Paucity by Stewart Stafford

Build the nation's mausoleum,
Light the people's funeral pyre,
For Hibernia's sons and daughters,
In genocide to expire.

Romantic Ireland has no grave,
It died foraging at the roadside for bites,
Or on a coffin ship out of reach of the New World,
An empire's boot on the throat for last rites.

Did you know your identity all along?
Or find it struggling and aghast?
Old Eireann was the first expendable colony,
And egregiously, not Britannia's last.

Constricting stomachs do not growl patriotic oaths,
Freedom is a stranger to a starved mind,
Force-feed our children grapes of wrath,
With liberation dead on the vine.

© Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Over and over again we find the Church councils complaining that the peasants (and sometimes the priests too) were singing 'wicked songs with a chorus of dancing women,' or holding 'ballads and dancings and evil and wanton songs and such-like lures of the devil'; over and over again the bishops forbade these songs and dances; but in vain. In every country in Europe, right through the Middle Ages to the time of the Reformation, and after it, country folk continued to sing and dance in the churchyard. Two hundred years after Charlemagne's death there grew up the legend of the dancers of Kölbigk, who danced on Christmas Eve in the churchyard, in spite of the warning of the priest, and all got rooted to the spot for a year, till the Archbishop of Cologne released them. Some men say that they were not rooted standing to the spot, but that they had to go on dancing for the whole year; and that before they were released they had danced themselves waist-deep into the ground. People used to repeat the little Latin verse which they were singing:
...
Through the leafy forest, Bovo went a-riding
And his pretty Merswind trotted on beside him--
Why are we standing still? Why can't we go away?”
― Eileen Power, Medieval People

“패전의 충격, 민족적 비애 따위에 금각은 초연했다. 혹은 초연을 가장하고 있었다. 어제까지의 금각은 이렇지 않았다. 결국 공습으로 불타지 않았다는 사실, 오늘 이후로는 이미 그럴 걱정이 없다는 사실, 이러한 사실들이 금각으로 하여금 다시 '옛날부터 나는 여기에 있었고 미래에도 영원히 여기에 있으리라'하는 표정을 되찾게 했음에 틀림없다.”
― Yukio Mishima, The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

“We enter into all major relationships with no real clue of where we are going: marriage, birth, friendship. We carry maps we believe are true: our parents' relationship, what it says in the baby books, the landscape of our own childhood. These maps are approximate at best, dangerously misleading at worst.”
― Maureen F. McHugh

“Fortunately, history does not pose problems without eventually producing solutions. The disenchanted, the disadvantaged and the disinherited seem, at times of deep crisis, to summon up some sort of genius that enables them to perceive and capture the appropriate weapons to carve out their destiny.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“man gav os vores frihed
sort på hvidt

til en symfoni af knuste ruder
og pistolskud
på et klaviatur af brændende kors”
― Mikas Lang, Melanin

“How many anarchists once they have read an anti-authoritarian account of some historical episode actually go and read accounts from other perspectives?”
― Christopher Day, The Historical Failure of Anarchism: Implications for the Future of the Revolutionary Project

“What Fairyland needed was the Romans, but the Romans never had much time for other people's make-believe. They just stuck their own temples where other people's temples were, co-opted rituals and renamed local gods and that was that--welcome to the Empire.”
― LaVie Tidhar

“Si l'on soulève les haillons hideux de l'Histoire, on trouve cela: la hiérarchie contre légalité et l'ordre contre la liberté.
(p127)”
― Eric Vuillard, L'Ordre du jour

“Et ce qui étonne dans cette guerre, c'est la réussite inouïe du culot, dont on doit retenir une chose: le monde cède au bluff. Même le monde le plus sérieux, le plus rigide, même le vieil ordre, s'il ne cède jamais à l'exigence de justice, s'il ne plie jamais devant le peuple qui s'insurge, plie devant le bluff.
(p118)”
― Éric Vuillard, L'Ordre du jour

“The individual stories of saltwater slavery form the antithesis of historical narrative, for they feature not an evolving plot of change over time, but rather a tale of endless repetition that allows no temporal progression. Every protagonist was a pioneer, blazing a trail on the same ground traveled by predecessors in saltwater slavery, but without the benefit of historical memory. It is a narrative in which time seems to stand still.”
― Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora

“They ... know from experience better than almost any other nation on earth how transient are material achievements and pomp and glory. ... the New Order pointed to the ruins of Persepolis as reminders of what Iran had once been and must strive to be again. The Iranian people also see in those ruins a monument to the vanity of human success.”
― Peter Avery

“the stupid attitude of the EUropeans out here - to antagonise rather than cooperate with the IRanians. Even among quite intelligent people here, this racial antipathy is to be found - and unless it goes, this company will.”
― L. P. Elwelllsutton

“Good days and bad days go past. What stays is a good name or a bad name.”
― muhammad mossadegh

“One by one those capitalist countries which arrive at a complete impasse, take the road of fascism”
― Felix Morrow, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Spain

“I refuse to listen to the insidious arguments of the skiers, who are constantly trying to persuade me to abandon the kayaks. I trust my kayaks and will not give in. I have reminded my companions of my unswerving conviction on more than one occasion.”
― Valerian Albanov, In the Land of White Death: An Epic Story of Survival in the Siberian Arctic

“La coscienza della Storia non è la coscienza delle vittime. Si vuole vedere l'assassino, non i morti.”
― Domenico Quirico, Addio Kabul

“Far from being misanthropic loners with anger issues, most of these pirates had lives that were intimately intertwined with the communities from which they came, and to which they one day hoped to return to enjoy their spoils. They viewed piracy as a job, not a lifestyle.”
― Eric Jay Dolin, Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America's Most Notorious Pirates

“The past is hidden in ashes, the future is an illusion. Only the present moment can give you happiness.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“If the past doesn't matter and the future is uncertain, what other options do you have?”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“Don’t bring the trash of your past into the present.”
― Sukant Ratnakar, Quantraz

“If you seek to know someone, study the home.”
― Adrien Malcolm Pierre