History Quotes - Page 31

Finally, my watchers had to fess up. In embarrassed and genuinely polite tones, they said they had no other choice but to arrest me. Then they accompanied me to the prison across the way. As I entered, an extremely tall SS man leapt in front of me and asked: “Do you have any weapons?” “Why?” I responded. “Do I need any?
Rudolph Herzog
Comrades, we are going to try to cheer you up, and our sense of humor will help us in this endeavor, although the phrase gallows humor has never seemed so logical and appropriate. The external circumstances are exactly in our favor. We need only to take a look at the barbed wire fences, so high and full of electricity. Just like your expectations.And then there are the watchtowers that monitor our every move. The guards have machine guns. But machine guns won’t intimidate us, comrades. They just have barrels of guns, whereas we are going to have barrels of laughs.You may be surprised at how upbeat and cheerful we are. Well, comrades, there are goods reasons for this. It’s been a long time since we were in Berlin. But every time we appeared there, we felt very uneasy. We were afraid we’d get sent to the concentration camps. Now that fear is gone. We’re already here.
Rudolph Herzog
On April 1, armed SA men took up positions in front of Jewish businesses and tried to prevent customers from spending money in them. Some troops painted anti-Semitic slogans and Stars of David on display windows; others were content to hold up signs calling for a boycott and to curse at Jewish businessmen. Some areas also saw looting and acts of violence.All in all, this display of activism made a very negative impression on most people, and the thuggish SA men with their uneducated bellowing were left even less popular among the general population than they had been before. Although very few Germans openly declared their solidarity with their Jewish fellow citizens, the boycott did not, as it was intended to do, set German gentiles against German Jews. On the contrary, ordinary people felt sorry for them, and if reports by the Nazis, who were disappointed by the boycott, are to be believed, the amount of commerce done afterward by Jewish-owned business did not decline at all.
Rudolph Herzog
When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. ("Going back to yesterday")
Erik Pevernagie
I guess love laughs at history a little.
Sebastian Barry
In the future, Martin will recall this night as the first time -- and one of the only times -- he ever saw Germans crying in public, not at the news of a dead loved one or at the sight of their bombed home, and not in physical pain, but from spontaneous emotion. For this brief time, they were not hiding from one another, wearing their masks of cold and practical detachment. The music stirred the hardened sediment of their memory, chafed against layers of horror and shame, and offered a rare solace in their shared anger, grief and guilt.
Jessica Shattuck
History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.
Timothy Snyder
In the foreign country, we call the past, crucifixion was a common punishment. It was invented by the Persians, carried back to Europe by Alexander the Great, and widely used in Mediterranean empires.
Steven Pinker
She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it an unforgettable thing, making it their own
Salman Rushdie
If the stones that we walked on could talk, they would surely tell our story." - Magnetic Reverie
Nico J. Genes
Misogyny was born of fear of women.
Sarah B. Pomeroy
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
. 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
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
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
Something, which the police called a bomb, had exploded in his shed. Investigations were begun, and the efforts of the authorities were soon to be categorized by the appropriate officals as "feverish", for bombs began to go off all over the place. The police collected fragments of the exploded bombs, and the press, anxious to help the police in their work, published impressive pictures of the fragments as well as a drawing of a reconstructed bomb together with a very detailed description of how it had been made.The police had done a really first-rate job. Even my brother and myself, both of us extremely untalented men in technical matters, could easily grasp how the bomb makers had gone to work. A large quantity of ordinary black gunpowder, such as is the be found in the cartridges sold for shoutguns, was encased in plasticine; in it was embedded an explosive cap, of the type used in hand grenades during the war, at the end of a thin wire; the other end of the wire was joined to the battery of a pocket flashlight -- obtainable at any village store -- and thence to the alarm mechanism of an ordinary alarm clock. The whole contratation was packed into a soapbox. Of course my brother did his duty as a journalist.He published the police report, together with the illustrations, on page one. It was not my brother's doing that this issue of the paper had a most spectacular success and that for weeks men were still buying it; no. the credit for that must go to the police; they had done their bit to ensure that the peasantry of Schleswig-Holstein would have a healthy occupation during the long winter evenings. Instead of just sitting and indulging in stupid thoughts, or doing crossword puzzles, or assembling to hear inflamatory speeches, the peasantery was henceforth quetly and busily engaged in procuring soapboxes and alarm clock and flashlight batteries. And then the bombs really began to go of.... Nobody ever asked me what I was actually doing in Schleswig=Holstein, save perhaps Dr. Hirschfeldt, a high official in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior, who had recently taken to frequenting Salinger's salon. Occasionally, and casually, he would glance at ne with his green eyes an honour me with a question, such as: "And what are the peasants up to in the north?" To which I would usually only reply: "Thank you for your interest. According to the statistics, the standard of living is going up -- in particular, there has been in increased demand for alarm clocks.
Ernst von Salomon
During World War II the top secret “Norden XV” or “Blue Ox” otherwise known the Army Airforce’s “Norden M Series Bombsights,” were used up to and including the Vietnam War by all American military aircraft with bomb carrying capabilities. This bombsight was considered a “Canonical Tachometric Design” meaning that it had the ability to measure the aircraft's direction and ground speed. In time the Norden improved its original design by using a computer that constantly calculated the aircraft’s flight characteristic and external wind forces to determine the bomb's impact point. When the B-17 Flying Fortress was designed, it came equipped with a Sperry A-3 Autopilot that only corrected angular deviations in the aircraft’s straight and level course. In time most bombsights were replaced by video displays on the instrument panel. Dumb or gravity bombs were mostly replaced with in-flight guidance bombs, such as laser-guided bombs or those using a GPS system. The last combat use of the Norden bombsight was by the US Navy during the covert “Operation Igloo White” mission when OP-2E Neptune aircraft dropped electronic sensors to detect enemy activity along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Project CHECO Southeast Asia Report was declassified on May 5, 2013.
Captain Hank Bracker
A great nation does not hide its history. It faces its flaws and corrects them.
George W. Bush
It is an affront to our present, and it is a bad prescription for our future. History cannot be changed. It cannot be moved like a statue. What is done is done.
Mitch Landrieu
The truth of history lies simultaneously in the substratum of created existence (since all beings are the willed realizations of God's love); in the fulfillment of the future of history (since God's love, in His will and its expressions - namely, created existence - is identifiable with the final communion of creation with the life of God); and in the incarnate Christ (since on God's part the personification of this loving will is the incarnate Christ). Whereby Christ becomes the "principle" and "end" of all things, the One who not only moves history from within its own unfolding but who also moves existence even from within the multiplicity of created things, toward the true being which is true life and true communion.
John D. Zizioulas
Historical periodization always tells a story. It is a narrative device for putting meaning into the flux of historical process - creating protagonists, heroes, pace, and plot. For this reason, the division of history into periods always carries an ideological load, and it is a methodological imperative to approach questions of broad historical periodization with this in mind.
James Ferguson
Something inexorable seeds itself in the place of your origin. You can never escape the bonds of family history, no matter how far you travel.
Christina Baker Kline
The collapse of communism and a recognition of its economic and humanitarian catastrophes took the romance out of revolutionary violence and cast doubt on the wisdom of redistributing wealth at the point of a gun.
Steven Pinker
One of the tragic ironies of the second half of the 20th century is that when colonies in the developing world freed themselves from European rule, they often slid back into warfare, this time intensified by modern weaponry, organized militias, and the freedom of young men to defy tribal elders.77 As we shall see in the next chapter, this development is a countercurrent to the historical decline of violence, but it is also a demonstration of the role of Leviathans in propelling the decline.
Steven Pinker
Some biblical scholars believe that the story of the fall from the Garden of Eden was a cultural memory of the transition from foraging to agriculture: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” 79 So why did our foraging ancestors leave Eden? For many, it was never an explicit choice: they had multiplied themselves into a Malthusian trap in which the fat of the land could no longer support them, and they had to grow their food themselves. The states emerged only later, and the foragers who lived at their frontiers could either be absorbed into them or hold out in their old way of life. For those who had the choice, Eden may have been just too dangerous. A few cavities, the odd abscess, and a couple of inches in height were a small price to pay for a fivefold better chance of not getting speared
Steven Pinker
I returned from the West, and brought home in my nostrils and nerves that benumbing lethargy, imprudent hostility, and arrogant superiority with which the West viewed the fate of Eastern Europe.
Sándor Márai
The study of history can be sobering and shocking, and morally troubling. One does not have to believe in original sin to do it successfully, but it probably helps. By relentlessly placing on display the pervasive crookedness of humanity's timber, history brings us back to earth, equips us to resist the powerful lure of radical expectations, and reminds us of the grimmer possibilities of human nature--possibilities that, for most people living in most times, have not been the least bit imaginary. With such realizations firmly in hand, we are far better equipped to move forward in the right way.
Wilfred M. McClay
So holding many factors constant, we find that living in a civilization reduces one’s chances of being a victim of violence fivefold.
Steven Pinker
Positive legacy of the 1960s was the revolutions in civil rights, women’s rights, children’s rights, and gay rights, which began to consolidate power in the 1990s as the baby boomers became the establishment. Their targeting of rape, battering, hate crimes, gay-bashing, and child abuse reframed law-and-order from a reactionary cause to a progressive one, and their efforts to make the home, workplace, schools, and streets safer for vulnerable groups (as in the feminist “Take Back the Night” protests) made these environments safer for everyone.
Steven Pinker
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
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
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
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
Knowledge that does not change behaviour is useless. But knowledge that changes behaviour quickly loses its relevance.
Yuval Noah Harari
Individual identities and national destines were shaped by the tripod of history, geography, and philosophy.
Patrick Mendis
Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.
Timothy Snyder
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
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
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
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 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
You judge people in the context of their time, not in the context of ours.
Dennis Prager

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