History can inform the present and help us shape the future. History can mean what happened in the past, or the story about what happened in the past, and these two don’t necessarily agree. Historian’s goals were often to glorify a person or nation, more than to tell objectively what happened. History textbooks have sometimes been bound by political rules about not telling embarrassing stories about the past. Every historian has cultural influences and assumptions, even if they attempt to be inclusive and objective. These quotations on history come from a variety of perspectives, moods, and authors.
Patriotism in the female sex is the most disinterested of all virtues. Excluded from honors and from offices, we cannot attach ourselves to the State or Government from having held a place of eminence. . . . Yet all history and every age exhibit instances of patriotic virtue in the female sex; which considering our situation equals the most heroic of yours.
The world will little note nor long remember what we say here.
False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news.
History teaches everything, even the future.
… being American is …
the past we step into
and how we repair it.
All who affirm the use of violence admit it is only a means to achieve justice and peace. But peace and justice are nonviolence…the final end of history. Those who abandon nonviolence have no sense of history. Rather they are bypassing history, freezing history, betraying history.
I’m really glad that our young people missed the Depression, and missed the great big war. But I do regret that they missed the leaders that I knew. Leaders who told us when things were tough, and that we would have to sacrifice, and these difficulties might last awhile. They didn’t tell us things were hard for us because we were different, or isolated, or special interests. They brought us together and they gave us a sense of national purpose.
It is fair to assume that when women in the past have achieved even a second or third place in the ranks of genius they have shown far more native ability than men have needed to reach the same eminence. Not excused from the more general duties that constitute the cement of society, most women of talent have had but one hand free with which to work out their ideal conceptions.
Every renaissance comes to the world with a cry, the cry of the human spirit to be free.
You know what the issue is? Do you want to know? It’s what these guys have decided to call America. They have the audacity to say, ‘There, you sons of bitches, don’t lay a finger on it. That is a finished product.’
But any country is still in the making. Always. That’s just history, people have to see that.
If you want the present to be different from the past, study the past.
In times like these, I look to the past. I come from people not meant to survive, and here is our bloodline, stronger than ever.
I do not know if the seasons remember their history or… if the oak tree remembers its planting. I do not know if the squirrel remembers last fall’s gathering or… if the night remembers the moon… Perhaps that is the reason for our births — to be the memory for creation. Perhaps salvation is something very different than anyone ever expected. Perhaps this will be the only question we will have to answer: “What can you tell me about September?”
All the lessons of history in four sentences:
Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad with power.
The mills of God grind slowly, but they grind exceedingly small.
The bee fertilizes the flower it robs.
When it is dark enough, you can see the stars.
Not to know what has been transacted in former times is to continue always a child. If no use is made of the labors of past ages, the world must remain always in the infancy of knowledge
There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.
Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child’s relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don’t know as much as we think we know.
Anyone who believes you can’t change history has never tried to write his memoirs.
I don’t think one can accurately measure the historical effectiveness of a poem; but one does know, of course, that books influence individuals; and individuals, although they are part of large economic and social processes, influence history. Every mass is after all made up of millions of individuals.
The tapestry of history has no point at which you can cut it and leave the design intelligible.
There is no life that does not contribute to history.
Skepticism has never founded empires, established principles, or changed the world’s heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.
For all his attention to my historical education, my father had neglected to tell me this: history’s terrible moments were real. I understand now, decades later, that he could never have told me. Only history itself can convince you of such a truth. And once you’ve seen that truth – really seen it – you can’t look away.
Never to forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over.
We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.
In the course of history, men come to see that iron necessity is neither iron nor necessary.
A great value of antiquity lies in the fact that its writings are the only ones that modern men still read with exactness.
The future influences the present just as much as the past.
When I’m telling you something don’t you ever ask if I’m lying. Because they didn’t want to leave no evidence of what they done—so it couldn’t be held against them. And I’m leaving evidence. And you got to leave evidence too. And your children got to leave evidence. And when it come time to hold up the evidence, we got to have evidence to hold up.
We are made wise not by the recollection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future.
And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed — if all records told the same tale — then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’
“Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”
We can learn from history how past generations thought and acted, how they responded to the demands of their time and how they solved their problems. We can learn by analogy, not by example, for our circumstances will always be different than theirs were. The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone. They foreclose the possibility of making other choices and thus they determine future events.
What we do about history matters. The often repeated saying that those who forget the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them has a lot of truth in it. But what are ‘the lessons of history’? The very attempt at definition furnishes ground for new conflicts. History is not a recipe book; past events are never replicated in the present in quite the same way. Historical events are infinitely variable and their interpretations are a constantly shifting process. There are no certainties to be found in the past.
Women’s history is the primary tool for women’s emancipation.
Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it’s one of the most charming things about them.
It is the soothing thing about history that it does repeat itself.
To Europe she was America, to America she was the gateway of the earth. But to tell the story of New York would be to write a social history of the world.
The past, the present and the future are really one: they are today.
It was the same with those old birds in Greece and Rome as it is now. The only thing new in the world is the history you don’t know.
If we remember those times and places — and there are so many — where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
I suggest that if you know history, then you might not be so easily fooled by the government when it tells you you must go to war for this or that reason — that history is a protective armor against being misled.
To be hopeful in bad times is based on the fact that human history is not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand Utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.
People like Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Jack London and Upton Sinclair were wonderful writers who joined the movement against war and injustice, against capitalism and corporate power. That was a very exciting period in American history.
Right time, right place, right people equals success.
Wrong time, wrong place, wrong people equals most of the real human history.
I love old houses. I’ve always lived in old houses. But old houses need a lot of work. The work is never done. Just when you think you’ve finished one renovation, it’s time to do something else; something else has gone wrong.
That’s what our country is like. You may not want to go into that basement, but if you really don’t go into that basement, it’s at your own peril. Whatever you are ignoring is not going to go away. Whatever you’re ignoring is only going to get worse. Whatever you’re ignoring will be there to be reckoned with until you reckon with it. And I think that that’s what we’re called upon to do where we are right now.
One thing I’ve learned is that at the core of white privilege is the entitlement to amnesia and ignorance. To forget that America was founded on stolen land, stolen labor, and genocide, and that we live in a society structured by this history, is to embrace an identity rooted in a false innocence and a flight from truth and healing. This is the rot at the root of the nation.
If you know whence you came, there is no limit to where you can go.
History does not refer merely, or even principally, to the past. On the contrary, the great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, and history is literally present in all that we do.
But history—a moving, organic network of causally related events—is hard to outwit or outflank. History embodies a logic and momentum of its own with resistances, rewards, and penalties. History soon outwitted the Whigs and left them in its dustbin.
