c2p-cmd/Good-Quotes-Authors huggingface dataset:
A generation is not defined by the options it has but by the choices it makes.
— Sharanya Haridas
We think that history is created in the big things, in the big events, but history is also created in the small things that we do every day, in the personal choices we make— to think or not to think, to hold our tongues or to speak up, to act or not to act. Our actions have a ripple effect on those around us. Every time we conform or don't, we're shaping the world into our vision or someone else's vision. The universe isn't made up of atoms it's made up of stories, and these stories are shaped in college campuses and coffee houses around the country, not just in boardrooms and government buildings.
— Sharanya Haridas
If all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.
— George Orwell, 1984
Be wary of any man who intentionally ignores another man's record of deeds or work history simply to impose their own agenda. Such a man's judgment lacks merit and should be disregarded immediately. Without a conscience, there is no truth in them.
— Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem
Whether we turn to the declarations of the past, or to the professions of the present, the conduct of the nation seems equally hideous and revolting. America is false to the past, false to the present, and solemnly binds herself to be false to the future.
— Frederick Douglass
People's imaginations have continued to work, right up to our own day; hence the incredible crop of fanciful allegations attributing to the Templars every kind of esoteric rite and belief, from the most ancient to the most vulgar, every variety of alchemical or magical knowledge, all kinds of initiation and affiliation rituals, those already in existence at the time and those yet to be conceived—in a word, all the "secrets" devised the slake the thirst for mystery inherent in human nature. This thirst, by a kind of instinctual reaction, seems never to be stronger than in those eras when people appear to reject all mysteries: let us recall that it was in Descartes' own day that trials for witchcraft were most numerous; that it was at the beginning of the rationalistic eighteenth century that Freemasonry was born; that our own scientific twentieth century is equally the century in which sects have proliferated, occultism has undergone a renaissance, and so on.
— Régine Pernoud, The Templars: Knights of Christ
Acknowledging that all our land was stolen from Native people feels like too great a burden, so we create an alternative reality that allows us to disengage emotionally from the truth.
— Daniel Hill, White Awake: An Honest Look at What It Means to Be White
Quite often, people inaccurately comment about the villains of the South and the heroes of the North. Such statements cause bitter debates. Thus, it is important to recognize the good and the bad from both the Confederate and Union armies. The fact is, the war stripped many men of their inhibitions and their immoral behaviors detrimentally affected all fellow Americans.
— Trevor P. Wardlaw, Sires and Sons: The Story of Hubbard's Regiment
We cannot shake off three hundred years of fear in three hours.
— Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices
While adoration periodically crept into the relationships between slaves and overseers, their most unsavory interactions provided the inexplicable narrative for a dark period in American history.
— Trevor P. Wardlaw, Slaves and Overseers: Antiquated Hate Crimes and Peculiar Relationships
To the anonymous reviewer of George F. Kennan's book, Russia Leaves the War, who wrote in the Times Literary Supplement (London), January 4, 1957, this sentence: "We still do not know at any level that really matters, why Wilson took the fateful decision to bring the United States into the First World War," I would like to say hello.
— Barbara Tuchman
That’s how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously.
— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.
— Arundhati Roy, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
The best way to make the true history a lasting legacy is to make it a lasting subject of learning
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
Progress in human affairs, whether in science or in history or in society, has come mainly through the bold readiness of human beings not to confine themselves to seeking piecemeal improvements in the way things are done, but to present fundamental challenges in the name of reason to the current way of doing things and to the avowed or hidden assumptions on which it rests
— Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
A transference of memory was occurring as she, the vessel, the source, wrung every small, muffled detail into me, the depository. And once it began, it was difficult to interrupt or stop
— Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.
— Friedrich Engels, On Historical Materialism
History is not nostalgic art, but history is ibrah, lessons, that we can pull to the present, to prepare for a better future,” -105
— Ahmad Fuadi, Negeri 5 Menara
Up there the world is divided into bastards and suckers. Make your choice.
— Derek Robinson, Piece of Cake
Good historians...have the future in their bones
— Edward Hallett Carr, What Is History?
According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life.
— Friedrich Engels
I have grown up listening to my grandparents’ stories about ‘the other side’ of the border. But, as a child, this other side didn’t quite register as Pakistan, or not-India, but rather as some mythic land devoid of geographic borders, ethnicity and nationality. In fact, through their stories, I imagined it as a land with mango orchards, joint families, village settlements, endless lengths of ancestral fields extending into the horizon, and quaint local bazaars teeming with excitement on festive days. As a result, the history of my grandparents’ early lives in what became Pakistan essentially came across as a very idyllic, somewhat rural, version of happiness.
— Aanchal Malhotra
Memorialization is not a passive practice but an active conversation.
— Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
We should have realized it sooner, at least my father should have, that there was no coming back. Not in September when the riots died down, not in October when the subcontinent still lay in shock, not even in November as he had hoped and promised us. Lahore was now lost forever
— Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
Partition memory is particularly pliable. Within it, the act of forgetting, either inevitably or purposefully, seems to play as much a part as remembering itself.
— Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
If I considered the Partition an archeological site, and the many experiences of those who witnessed it as the site’s structural sedimentation, then the deeper I excavated, the more I found, and that too in innumerable renditions.
— Aanchal Malhotra, Remnants of a Separation: A History of the Partition through Material Memory
History matters, not because it repeats itself (which it never does), but because its narration can rid demons that torment the oppressed, shock the complacent and intransigent into self-reflection, and inspire feats of human perseverance and will.
— Seth Garfield, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988
History is made not of facts set in stone but of the stories we tell.
— Michelle Richmond, Golden State
An individual is no match for history.
— Roberto Bolaño
Tolstoy was perfectly right to protest that history is not made to happen by the combination of such obscure entities as the ‘power’ or ‘mental activity’ assumed by naïve historians; indeed he was, in Kareev’s view, at his best when he denounced the tendency of metaphysically minded writers to attribute causal efficacy to, or idealise, such abstract entities as ‘heroes’, ‘historic forces’, ‘moral forces’, ‘nationalism’, ‘reason’ and so on, whereby they simultaneously committed the two deadly sins of inventing non-existent entities to explain concrete events and of giving free reign to personal, or national, or class, or metaphysical bias.
— Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy's View of History
History is the hidden map of who, where and how we are today.
— Elena Lappin, What Language Do I Dream In?
Just because history says it isn't possible doesn't mean that there aren't exceptions.
— Gail Carriger, Blameless
Knowledge can never imprison you, but you can be captive to your ignorance.
— A.E. Samaan
... one could find plenty of intelligent women in the world if one were willing to look.
— Christine de Pizan, The Selected Writings
What is history? What is its significance for humanity? Dr. J. H. Robinson gives us a precise answer: "Man's abject dependence on the past gives rise to the continuity of history. Our convictions, opinions, prejudices, intellectual tastes; our knowledge, our methods of learning and of applying for information we owe, with slight exceptions, to the past-often to the remote past. History is an expansion of memory, and like memory it alone can explain the present and in this lies its most unmistakable value.
— Alfred Korzybski, Manhood of Humanity
All our ancestors were murdered, murderers, complicit to murder, or combating murder.
— Lucy Knisley, An Age of License: A Travelogue
Dictators have no peers; only sycophants to do their bidding. That is how it was in Nazi Germany. And so it is wherever autocrats rule in government or in business. Dictators and braggarts cause their own demise, because when they finally are in extremis, they have only their lackeys to call on, while their adversaries attract the best of men.
— Richard W. Sonnenfeldt, Witness to Nuremberg
In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down.
— Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace
What just cause can be found for the encounter of so many nations, or what hatred inspired them all to take arms against each other? It is proof that the human race lives for its kings, for it is at the mad impulse of one mind a slaughter of nations takes place, and at the whim of a haughty ruler that which nature has taken ages to produce perishes in a moment.
— Jordanes, The Origin and Deeds of the Goths
It seems that, once introduced into public life, evil easily perpetuates itself, whereas good is always difficult, rare, and fragile. And yet possible.
— Tzvetan Todorov, The Fragility of Goodness: Why Bulgaria's Jews Survived the Holocaust
When history disappears, you disappear.
— Justin Barricks
10 fundamental lessons of history:1. We do not learn from history.2. Science and technology do not make us immune to the laws of history.3. Freedom is not a universal value.4. Power is the universal value.5. The Middle East is the crucible of conflict and the graveyard of empires.6. The United States shares the destinies of the great democracies, the republics, and the superpowers of the past.7. Along with the lust for power, religion and spirituality are the most profound motivators in human history.8. Great nations rise and fall because of human decisions made by individual leaders.9. The statesman is distinguished from a mere politician by four qualities: a bedrock of principles, a moral compass, a vision, and the ability to create a consensus to achieve that vision.10. Throughout its history, the United States has charted a unique role in history.
— J. Rufus Fears, The Wisdom of History
The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.
— Cristina García, Dreaming in Cuban
To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history.
— Elizabeth Kostova, The Historian
Have I have played my part well in the comedy of life? If so, clap your hands and dismiss me from the stage with applause.
— Augustus
If we wish to understand our own place on earth, we must seek to understand those who have gone on before us. We must look beyond the present moment and see ourselves reflected in the deep pool of time as individual elements of a greater humanity.
— Ian Mortimer, The Outcasts of Time
We assume that anything that is new to us is new to human society as a whole, and that if we don’t see it reflected in history textbooks and in recent memory then it cannot have existed for long.
— C. N. Lester
Shame, as an emotion, has a core meaning, in relating individuals to wider social groups and norms -- real or imagined.
— Peter N. Stearns, Shame: A Brief History
She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious.The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community.Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop.
— Susan Wiggs, The Apple Orchard
What’s this war called again?”“The Hundred Years War.”“Hmmmm, got a bad feeling about this one.
— Karl Wiggins, Calico Jack in your Garden
History repeats itself. Historians repeat each other.
— Philip Guedalla
It is hard to remember.”“Remember what?”“All that goes into the making of any one moment we live. There are things one must try to remember. Do you know what is the hardest thing to remember?”“No,” Adam said.“Well, I’ll tell you, my son,” Aaron Blaustein said. “The hardest thing to remember is that other men are men.” He leaned to set his cup down. “But that,” he said, “is the only way you can be a man yourself. Can be anything.
— Robert Penn Warren, Wilderness: A Tale Of The Civil War
Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?
— Robert Penn Warren, Democracy and Poetry
But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past.
— Robert Penn Warren, A Place to Come To
So time continued on slowly and painfully. Perhaps the old analogy of being a record stuck on repeat had become too dated
—  I felt like I’d just gotten an IPod and only could afford one song so that one song played over and over again until I felt as if it was just part of the constant monotony.
She was going to be okay. I knew she was. She had forever changed my life and I had changed hers. I had heard a soldier once speak of the camaraderie men who fight in battle have with each other. I felt that way with Bathsheba now. She was more than just a name in my Bible, and we’d become more than just friends.
— Anna Aquino
History may be just bones and ruins to you, but it is people, Janet. People loving, hurting, and dying.
— Cindy Tomamichel, Druid's Portal: The First Journey
The line from psychologists is, if you’ve seen it before, it hasn’t killed you yet.
— Derek Thompson, Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction
This tottered ensign of my ancestorsWhich swept the desert shore of that dead seaWhereof we got the name of Mortimer,Will I advance upon these castle-walls.Drums, strike alarum, raise them from their sport,And sing aloud the knell of Gaveston!
— Christopher Marlowe, Edward II
future could be read much more clearly in the streets, factories, and barracks than in the morning press.
— Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind
I have got the Arctic lure and will certainly go North again.
— Louise Arner Boyd
I must say that the charm of the Arctic, its infinite diversity, its aloofness from the rest of the world, made it a field which gives its own reward. Only those who have seen the magnificent sunsets over the ice, who have…been buffeted by storms… can appreciate the spell which always draws us back there.
— Louise Arner Boyd
It is not acceptable that election winners interpret history. History should be left to historians who have a difficult task. They should try to avoid a one-sided or personal interpretation of history. Furthermore, some collective factors (such as national enthusiasm) may influence objectivity that is crucial for the interpretation of historical events.
— Eraldo Banovac
I love learning. I love history. But there's history in everything. Every building, everybody you talk to. It's not limited to libraries and museums. I think people who spend their lives in school forget that sometimes. -Tak
— Becky  Chambers, A Closed and Common Orbit
I realized that even if no one ever found me, and even if I lived out the rest of my life here, always missing, forever a missing person to other people, I could never be missing to myself, I could never delete my own history, and I would always know exactly where I was and where I had been and I would never wake up not being who I was and it didn't matter how much or how little I thought I understood the mess of myself, because I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself and that was what I had wanted all this time, to go fully missing, but I would never be able to go fully missing—nobody is missing like that, no one has ever had that luxury and no one ever will.
— Catherine Lacey, Nobody Is Ever Missing
The facts of religion were convincing only to those who were already convinced.
— Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.(Marx, 1963)
— Karl Marx
Our neighbor, Hugo du Toit, was a very handsome Afrikaner, who, with his two sisters, was a close friend of Louis Botha, the first Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, and also a close friend of General Jan Christiaan Smuts, the Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 until 1924. He became a South African military leader during World War II. Although some accuse Smuts of having started apartheid, he later stood against it and was a force behind the founding of the United Nations. He is still considered one of the most eminent Afrikaners ever…. At his expansive farm house, Hugo had autographed photos of both men on his study wall. Parties were frequently held at my grandparents’ home and the thought of roasted turkeys and potatoes which Cherie had prepared, brings back warm memories of a delightful era, now lost forever.” The Colonial History of South AfricaFor many years South Africa was occupied primarily by Dutch farmers known as Boers who had first arrived in the Cape of Good Hope in 1652 when Jan van Riebeeck established the Dutch East India Company and later by British settlers who arrived in the Cape colony after the Napoleonic wars in the 1820’s, on board the sailing ships the Nautilus and the Chapman. For the most part the two got along like oil and water. After 1806, some of the Dutch-speaking settlers left the Cape Colony and trekked into the interior where they established the Boer Republics. There were many skirmishes between them, as well as with the native tribes. In 1877 after the First Boer War between the Dutch speaking farmers and the English, the Transvaal Boer republic was seized by Britain. Hostilities continued until the Second Boer War erupted in October of 1899, costing the British 22,000 lives. The Dutch speaking farmers, now called Afrikaners, lost 7,000 men and having been overrun by the English acknowledged British sovereignty by signing the peace agreement, known as the “Treaty of Vereeniging,” on May 31, 1902.Although this thumbnail sketch of South African history leaves much unsaid, the colonial lifestyle continued on for the privileged white ruling class until the white, pro-apartheid National Party, was peacefully ousted when the African National Congress won a special national election. Nelson Mandela was elected as the first black president on May 9, 1994. On May 10, 1994, Mandela was inaugurated as The Republic of South Africa's new freely elected President with Thabo Mbeki and F.W. De Klerk as his vice-presidents.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Suppresed I Rise"
If the ravens leave the Tower, Britain will fall.
— John Owen Theobald, These Dark Wings
flaunting the Kohinoor on the Queen Mother’s crown in the Tower of London is a powerful reminder of the injustices perpetrated by the former imperial power. Until it is returned—at least as a symbolic gesture of expiation—it will remain evidence of the loot, plunder and misappropriation that colonialism was really all about. Perhaps that is the best argument for leaving the Kohinoor where it emphatically does not belong—in British hands.
— Shashi Tharoor, An Era of Darkness: The British Empire in India
The history of man is a must read poetry.
— Lailah Gifty Akita
A great many things keep happening, some good, some bad.
— Gregory of Tours, The History of the Franks
So, what’s the status?” said Ira as he pulled himself down to his couch.“Will is turning into a starship,” Hugo replied, clearly only half in jest. “We’re about to watch history in the making.
— Alex  Lamb, Roboteer
Europeans believe that culture is something they can grasp and touch because, for them, culture is comprised of objects, or remnants of objects, and this object, this remnant, conceals within it the essence of the original. For the Chinese, the matter is completely different---for them, the essence of culture can only be preserved in spiritual form.
— László Krasznahorkai, Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage
It does appear that some parts of our evolutionary process seem inevitable. It is striking that throughout evolutionary history, the eye evolved independently fifty to a hundred times. This is strong evidence for the fact that the different rolls of the dice that have occurred across different species seem to have produced species with eyes regardless of what is going on around them. Lots of other examples illustrate how some features, if they are advantageous, seem to rise to the top of the evolutionary swamp. This is illustrated every time you see the same feature appearing more than once in different parts of the animal kingdom. Dolphins and bats, for example, use echolocation, but they evolved this trait independently at very different points on the evolutionary tree.
— Marcus du Sautoy, The Great Unknown: Seven Journeys to the Frontiers of Science
In 1821, the United States government sent Dr. Eli Ayres to West Africa to buy, on what was known as the “Pepper Coast,” land that could be used as a colony for relocated slaves from America. He sailed to the location on the Mesurado River aboard the naval schooner USS Alligator, commanded by Lieutenant Robert Stockton. When they arrived, Stockton forced the sale of some land at gunpoint, from a local tribal chief named King Peter. Soon after this sale was consummated, returned slaves and their stores were landed as colonists on Providence and Bushrod Islands in the Montserado River. However, once the USS Alligator left the new colonists, they were confronted by King Peter and his tribe. It took some doing but on April 25, 1822 this group moved off the low lying, mosquito infested islands and took possession of the highlands behind Cape Montserado, thereby founding present day Monrovia. Named after U.S. President James Monroe, it became the second permanent African American settlement in Africa after Freetown, Sierra Leone.Thus the colony had its beginnings, but not without continuing problems with the local inhabitants who felt that they had been cheated in the forced property transaction. With the onset of the rainy season, disease, shortage of supplies and ongoing hostilities, caused the venture to almost fail. As these problems increased, Dr. Ayres wanted to retreat to Sierra Leone again, but Elijah Johnson an African American, who was one of the first colonial agents of the American Colonization Society, declared that he was there to stay and would never leave his new home. Dr. Eli Ayres however decided that enough was enough and left to return to the United States, leaving Elijah and the remaining settlers behind. The colony was nearly lost if it was not for the arrival of another ship, the U.S. Strong carrying the Reverent Jehudi Ashmun and thirty-seven additional emigrants, along with much needed stores. It didn’t take long before the settlement was identified as a “Little America” on the western coast of Africa. Later even the flag was fashioned after the American flag by seven women; Susannah Lewis, Matilda Newport, Rachel Johnson, Mary Hunter, J.B. Russwurm, Conilette Teage, and Sara Dripper. On August 24, 1847 the flag was flown for the first time and that date officially became known as “Flag Day.” With that a new nation was born!
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."
Here we find the roots of American wealth and democracy—in the for-profit destruction of the most important asset available to any people, the family. The destruction was not incidental to America’s rise; it facilitated that rise. By erecting a slave society, America created the economic foundation for its great experiment in democracy.
— Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case for Reparations
I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
I am not so different in my history of abandonment from anyone else after all. We have all been split away from each other, the earth, ourselves.
— Susan Griffin, A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War
The government, which was designed for the people, has got into the hands of the bosses and their employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy.” Woodrow Wilson, twenty-eighth President of the United States of America. Served 1913–1921. President during World War I, only President to be interred within Washington, DC, at the National Cathedral.
— Max Allan Collins, Executive Order
One UniVerse for the LivingWhile palaces attest to the power of men,And monuments mark their wars,Little remains of the women who've been- Except for the sons that they bore.But the voices of women were baked into breadAnd later buttered with epicsWhile the souls of their daughtersStitched with fine threadBecame tapestries stored in attics.And all through the agesMen boasted like beastsErecting pillars of marble and stone,But still they found themselves only to beSculpted of flesh and bone.Philosophers pondered the nature of godsOutlawing temptations that plagued themAnd earning themselves, against all odds,The power to punish the pagans.By writing themselves into sacred booksThe clergymen sealed our fateTo follow decrees that have their rootsIn nothing but misguided hate.So, children of Adam and invisible Eve,challenge the wisdom of sages. Don’t be so sure sacred scrolls that you readAren't filled with human pages.Walk in the wilderness.Eat of the fruit. Don't let them buy you with wages.Plant your own garden.Drink of the wine.Learn how to be courageous.Hearts that are hardenedTo what is divineHave honored the dead too long.Search for the storiesBaked into breadAnd eat until you are strong.
— Nancy Boutilier, On the Eighth Day Adam Slept Alone: New Poems
Wonder Woman didn't begin in 1941 when William Moulton Marston turned in his first script to Sheldon Mayer. Wonder Woman began on a winter day in 1904 when Margaret Sanger dug Olive Byrne out of a snowbank.
— Jill Lepore, The Secret History of Wonder Woman
There is the body of history ever atop of us, and the body of memory rustling within us. Between the two, we are crushed.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
You judge people in the context of their time, not in the context of ours.
— Dennis Prager
The problem is that history is not a dialectic progression but a biome, a swamp where ideas chase each other around and wallow and where drupelets of their larvae cluster and then hatch to devour siblings.
— Eugene Lim, Dear Cyborgs
History was what had happened
—  class was something you read about in a book.
Class was what formed you, but didn’t travel to other cultures – it became invisible abroad. In foreign places, you were singled out by religion and race, but not class, which was more indecipherable than any other mother tongue. He’d learnt that not only were light, language, and weather contingent – class was too.
— Amit Chaudhuri, Odysseus Abroad
Calcutta has still not recovered from history: people mourn the past, and abhor it deeply.
— Amit Chaudhuri, Calcutta: Two Years in the City
Historians are lenient to those who succeed and stern to those who fail; in this, and this alone, they display strong political sense.
— J. Christopher Herold, Bonaparte in Egypt
Every age has its darkness....
— Liz Braswell, As Old as Time
I look out at the reservation, still and glittering with casinos, and think of all the death dried up and buried in its dirt.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
I faded out. I was for a moment my father tapping on his cigarette, the way he holds it, crushing it flat. I was my mother at the sink, staring into the desert from the kitchen window, dishes in hand. I was in all the beds I'd ever slept in. Me sinking into the sheets, letting my thoughts fall down. I was running alongside the ocean, Laura splashing me with water. I was dancing to a melody I did not recognize, spinning wild and lovely into exalted leaps. I was no one again. I was someone with no name, no past. My face resumed the freshness of birth, the brightness was again in my eyes, the brightness only children own before life begins its wreckage.
— Hannah Lillith Assadi, Sonora
This is Shakespeare and Company, it's the most famous bookstore in the world." She pointed to the shelves that reached the ceiling. "Surely you have something on the feudal system or the court of the Sun King?""All our books are in English, and there is not a great demand for works on the French aristocracy.""That's the problem with Americans, they're only interested in themselves," she sighed. "I learned about the Civil War every year from the fifth grade, but I never studied the Wars of the Roses.
— Anita Hughes, Christmas in Paris
A religion deeply rooted in theology, is never above skepticism hinged upon the twin pillars; of reason & facts.
— Mamur Mustapha
Yes, if the stones that we walked on could talk, they would surely tell our story.
— Nico J. Genes, Magnetic Reverie
On Sunday evenings, there was a comparatively vast array of radio shows from which to choose. Frequently I would lie in my bed with my father, who would pull the covers over our heads and pretend that we were in a cave. This is how we would listen to shows such as Jack Benny, The Great Gildersleeve with Harold Peary, The Fred Allen Show, and The Edgar Bergen Show. As a ventriloquist, Edgar Bergen had Charlie McCarthy and the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd as puppets. For us the last show of the evening was always Your Hit Parade sponsored by Lucky Strike Cigarettes, starring Snooky Lanson, Gisele MacKenzie and a host of other well-known singers of that period. Although my father was a strict disciplinarian, on Sunday evenings he usually relaxed things and we would enjoy our time listening to the radio together.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."
Grow past your past and march past the flag of the past!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
There was a certain untamed energy about the west of Ireland – full of tragedy and struggle, sown with the flesh of the departed.
— Rhian J. Martin
For paranoia was Zig's late style: How else but through networks and conspiracies could he fashion a target big enough for his outrage? Richard usually found paranoia uninteresting, insofar as it swept away the incidental, which was the real grist of history.
— Garth Risk Hallberg, City on Fire
When the past is mentioned, some cry! When the past is mentioned, some ponder! When the past is mentioned, never again comes into the mind of some people. When the past is mentioned, some recall their had I known! The past is past, but its footprints never go!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah, Religion, Philosophy and life
I hope to stand firm enough not to go backward, and yet not go forward fast enough to wreck the country's cause.
— Doris Kearns Goodwin, Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln
History is not the past – it is the method we have evolved of organising our ignorance of the past
— Hilary Mantel
we are here confronted with an irreducible oddity about all human societies: all are strung around figments of the human imagination.
— Patricia Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World
Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.
— Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
The United States is the result of an enlightened philosophy
—  China is the outcome of traditions and history.
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
— Patrick Mendis, Peaceful War: How the Chinese Dream and the American Destiny Create a New Pacific World Order
Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.
— Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century
The very notion of Great Britain's "greatness" is bound up with Empire,' the cultural theorist, Stuart Hall, once wrote: 'Euro-scepticism and littel Englander nationalism could hardly survive if people understood whose sugar flowed through English blood , and rotted English teeth.
— Andrea Levy, Six Stories and An Essay
It was a glorious experience for the children to travel by rail and the panoramic views of Africa through the big glass window in the rear of the last car of the Blue Train, were beyond description. It was just as you would expect it to be, as described in a vintage National Geographic magazine, with springbok and other wild animals abounding. The distance is approximately the same as from New York City to Chicago and took an overnight. Adeline and Lucia talked late into the night as the children tried to hear what was being said. There was a lot of catching up to do, but it had been a long and exhausting day and the next thing they all knew, it was the following morning and the train was approaching Cape Town or Kaapstad in Afrikaans, affectionately known as the “Tavern of the Seas.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Suppresed I Rise"
On March 12, 2015, the AIM Development Company, that deals in scrap metal, met to discuss demolishing the now defunct Verso Paper Mill in Bucksport, located at the head of Penobscot Bay. The paper mill was first built by the Maine Seaboard Paper Company in 1930. Demolition of the mill is expected to be completed in 2016. However, company representatives and town officials did not discuss what AIM might do with the 250-acre waterfront site once the demolition work is complete. Originally it was believed that a recycling facility, using the deep-water port access to export salvaged metals, would be the most likely thing to be built on this site; however this plan has now been scrapped. In 1980 this mill employed more than 1,350 workers and was the largest employer in Bucksport, a town of about 5,000 residents.The demolition and removal took much longer than anyone expected and as salvage crews continued working, a fire broke out on March 19, 2017. Apparently the fire erupted at about 8:30 a,m. as workers using cutting torches, cut into the metal exterior wall of the mill. Spreading to the roof of the building, it was debated as to the feasibility of allowing the fire to destroy the remaining structure. Considering the safety involved firefighters from Bucksport and surrounding towns extinguished the fire. It is expected that the remaining remnants will be demolished by the middle of 2017 in fact the company has open rail cars in position, waiting to remove whatever is left of the mill.
— Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater One...."
As it was a time of war between the Catholics and the Huguenots, and as he saw the Catholics exterminate the Huguenots and the Huguenots exterminate the Catholics--all in the name of religion--he adopted a mixed belief which permitted him to be sometimes Catholic, sometimes a Huguenot. Now, he was accustomed to walk with his fowling piece on his shoulder, behind the hedges which border the roads, and when he saw a Catholic coming alone, the Protestant religion immediately prevailed in his mind. He lowered his gun in the direction of the traveler; then, when he was within ten paces of him, he commenced a conversation which almost always ended by the traveler's abandoning his purse to save his life. It goes without saying that when he saw a Huguenot coming, he felt himself filled with such ardent Catholic zeal that he could not understand how, a quarter of an hour before, he had been able to have any doubts upon the superiority of our holy religion.
— Alexandre Dumas, The Three Musketeers
The people we find truly anathema are the ones who reduce the past to caricature and distortit to fit their own bigoted stereotypes. We’ve gone to events that claimed to be historic fashionshows but turned out to be gaudy polyester parades with no shadow of reality behind them. Aswe heard our ancestors mocked and bigoted stereotypes presented as facts, we felt like we hadgone to an event advertised as an NAACP convention only to discover it was actually a minstrelshow featuring actors in blackface. Some so-called “living history” events really are that bigoted.When we object to history being degraded this way, the guilty parties shout that they are “justhaving fun.” What they are really doing is attacking a past that cannot defend itself. Perhapsthey are having fun, but it is the sort of fun a schoolyard brute has at the expense of a child whogoes home bruised and weeping. It’s time someone stood up for the past.I have always hated bullies. The instinct to attack difference can be seen in every socialspecies, but if humans truly desire to rise above barbarism, then we must cease acting like beasts.The human race may have been born in mud and ignorance, but we are blessed with mindssufficiently powerful to shape our behavior. Personal choices form the lives of individuals; thesum of all interactions determine the nature of societies.At present, it is politically fashionable in America to tolerate limited diversity based aroundrace, religion, and sexual orientation, yet following a trend does not equate with being trulyopen-minded. There are people who proudly proclaim they support women’s rights, yet have anappallingly limited definition of what those rights entail. (Currently, fashionable privileges arevoting, working outside the home, and easy divorce; some people would be dumbfounded at theidea that creating beautiful things, working inside the home, and marriage are equally desirablerights for many women.) In the eighteenth century, Voltaire declared, “I disagree with what yousay but I will fight to the death for your right to say it.”3 Many modern Americans seem to haveperverted this to, “I will fight to the death for your right to agree with what I say.”When we stand up for history, we are in our way standing up for all true diversity. When wequestion stereotypes and fight ignorance about the past, we force people to question ignorance ingeneral.
— Sarah A. Chrisman, This Victorian Life: Modern Adventures in Nineteenth-Century Culture, Cooking, Fashion, and Technology
At the age of nineteen, on my own initiative and at my own expense, I raised an army by means of which I restored liberty4 to the republic, which had been oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.
— Augustus, Res Gestae Divi Augusti
Gower is the first English writer to use "history" as an English word. He regularly rhymes the term with "memory," for to his way of thinking history and memory are correlative. That is, without history, there can be no memory; and without memory, there can be no history. But the point of historical knowledge is not to enable people to live in the past, or even to understand the past in the way we would expect a modern historian to proceed; rather, it is to enable people to live more vitally in the present.
— Russell A. Peck, Confessio Amantis, Volume 2
Individuals make history, but it's also a collective thing, a wave that people ride in their time, a wave made of individual actions. So ultimately history is another particle/wave duality that no one can parse or understand.
— Kim Stanley Robinson, New York 2140
Our history, America’s history, has been so heavily edited. In history classes, we don’t really go into full discussions about the past. People, struggles, and triumphs have been erased. As a result, we now have a generation, my generation, of people who are intelligent but ignorant of and blind to the truth.
— Janelle Gray, Echoes of the Struggle
I watched as people went to the memorial reading the names. I started at the first entry from 1954. I read each one quietly but out loud to myself, like I’d done with the names of those in the museum. I felt somehow they were getting the message that their sacrifice was known and their voice was heard.
— Janelle Gray, Echoes of the Struggle
I know that imprisonment will be harder for me than it has ever been for anyone, filled with cowardly threats and hideous cruelty. But I do not fear prison, as I do not fear the fury of the miserable tyrant who took the lives of 70 of my comrades. Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.
— Fidel Castro, History Will Absolve Me
. Despite the considerable horror they had felt when the SA men were bellowing crude anti-Semitic slogans, in retrospect the joke-tellers were very much aware of the boycott’s inherent absurdity:A city on the Rhine during the boycott: SA men stand in front of Jewish businesses and “warn” passers-by against entering them. Nonetheless, a woman tries to go into a knitting shop.An SA man stops her and says, “Hey, you. Stay outside. That’s a Jewish shop!”“So?” replies the woman. “I’m Jewish myself.”The SA man pushes her back. “Anyone can say that!
— Rudolph Herzog, Dead Funny: Humor in Hitler's Germany
At the age of nineteen [44 BC] on my own responsibility and at my own expense I raised an army, with which I successfully championed the liberty of the republic when it was oppressed by the tyranny of a faction.
— Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus
Of course it was not only the law that interfered with our management of the paper. The politicians, too, soon took a hand. The Oberpräsident of Schleswig-Holstein, a man named Kürbis (which is German for pumpkin) forbad its publication; it appeared the next day, entitled Die Westküste [The West Coat]. This too was banned, and for a short time my brother's wish was fulfilled and we edited Die Grüne Front. I, too, had the gratification of seeing my original suggestion realised whn it became, in due course, Die Sturmglocke. Finally, the Oberpräsident forbad us from publishing any paper at all which was not purely concerned with technical agricultural matters. So we rechristened it Der Kürbis, aand the leading article consisted of variations on the subject of pumpking as given in the encyclopaedia; we expatiated on how pumkins flourish best in plenty of dung and on the disagreeable nature of their blossom's scwent. Thenceforth the paper resumed its original name of Das Landvolk and that was that.
— Ernst von Salomon, Der Fragebogen
There is no history of mankind, there is only an indefinite number of histories of all kinds of aspects of human life. And one of these is the history of political power. This is elevated into the history of the world. But this, I hold, is an offence against every decent conception of mankind. It is hardly better than to treat the history of embezzlement or of robbery or of poisoning as the history of mankind. For the history of power politics is nothing but the history of international crime and mass murder.
— Karl Popper
Photos of yesterday give good evidence of how yesterday was and they are a true prove of history!
— Ernest Agyemang Yeboah