Quotes about History

History travels not only forwards; history can travel backwards, history can travel sideways.

It's embedded in founding documents that could simultaneously proclaim all men equal and yet count a slave as three-fifths of a man. It finds

Every life is different because you passed this way and touched history. Even the child Ruth May touched history. Everyone is complicit. The okapi complied by living, and the spider by dying. It would have lived if it could. Listen: being dead is not worse than being alive. It is different, though. You could say the view is larger.

He was my father. I own half his genes, and all of his history. Believe this: the mistakes are part of the story. I am born of a man who believed he could tell nothing but the truth, while he set down for all time the Poisonwood Bible.

Shoes would interfere with her conversation, for she constantly addresses the ground under her feet. Asking forgiveness. Owning, disowning, recanting, recharting a hateful course of events to make sense of her complicity. We all are, I suppose. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one, My life; what I stole from history, and how I live with it.

What we end up calling history is a kind of knife, slicing down through time. A few people are hard enough to bend its edge. But most won't even stand close to the blade. I'm one of those. We don't bend anything.

The first to fall in any war are forgotten.

You can fool history sometimes, but you can't fool the memory of your intimates.

History is not good news or bad news, it's just one big story unreeling. There are no small parts, only small actors.

Her mark on history: the female acquaintance.

Our problems and pain are universal and increasing, and the solutions to the problems are and always will be based upon universal, timeless, self-evident principles common to every enduring, prospering society throughout history.

But let my due feet never fail to walk the studious cloisters pale, And love the high embowed roof, With antique pillars massy proof, And storied windows richly dight; casting a dim religious light.