Quotes about history
page 56

“Democracy is a freak condition in the world's history: civil liberties are not common liberties even today, and most people in the world have never possessed them.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

Source: The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000 (1988)

Democracy, World, People

“One lesson of history is that every gain has its potential loss. The highest human achievements carry the danger of pride, and pride can lead blindly to disaster, just as failure can fortify the determination and so lead slowly towards triumph.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000 (1988)

Loss, Failure

“History is so important. It explores and tells us who we are. We should be doing more of it as a country, not less.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/may/01/studying-history-should-not-be-only-for-the-elite-say-academics
Studying history should not be only for the elite, say academics
Anna
Fazackerley
The Guardian
1 May 2021
2 May 2021

Country

“I love art, and I love history, but it is living art and living history that I love... It is in the interest of living art and living history that I oppose so-called restoration. What history can there be in a building bedaubed with ornament, which cannot at the best be anything but a hopeless and lifeless imitation of the hope and vigour of the earlier world?”

William Morris (1834–1896) author, designer, and craftsman

"The History of Pattern-Designing" lecture (1882) The Collected Works of William Morris (1910 - 1915) Vol. 22

World, Love, Making love, Hope

“Marjorie is wrong, and her intentional decision to compare the horrors of the Holocaust with wearing masks is appalling. The Holocaust is the greatest atrocity committed in history. The fact that this needs to be stated today is deeply troubling.”

Marjorie Taylor Greene (1974) American politician and businesswoman from the state of Georgia

Statement from House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy https://republicanleader.house.gov/leader-mccarthy-condemns-comparisons-to-the-holocaust/, 25 May 2021 About

Decision

“God is in command of history. Each crisis has something to teach us; each crisis is overcome by particular virtues and by reference to particular truths. The way out of a crisis is often unexpected, and often combines a decisive historical intervention by God, and a new spirit in the Church, animating new movements and new thinking. With hindsight we can even see in some cases how the crisis itself solved intractable problems which could not be solved in any other way”

Joseph Shaw (academic) (1971) British academic

Interview with Dr. Joseph Shaw https://remnantnewspaper.com/web/index.php/fetzen-fliegen/item/5036-interview-with-dr-joseph-shaw (August 28, 2020)

God, Animals, Truth, Problem

“Governments throughout history have been run by tyrants.”

David Cay Johnston (1948) Investigative journalist and author

The Tyrant Next Time (November 7, 2019)

“Today I stand before the United Nations General Assembly to share the extraordinary progress we've made. In less than two years, my administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Address to UN General Assembly, quoted in * 2018-09-26
Trump's U.N. speech pitting globalism against patriotism proves the president has no idea what patriotism means
Daniel Shapiro
NBC News
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/trump-s-u-n-speech-pitting-globalism-against-patriotism-proves-ncna913141
2018, September 2018

Country

“The Italian Government has now written her perfidy indelibly with letters of blood on the pages of history.”

Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg (1856–1921) German chancellor during World War I

Speech to the Reichstag (28 May 1915), quoted in W. W. Coole (ed.), Thus Spake Germany (1941), p. 222

“Our understanding of history and the country is shaped by the images the survive.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/1356274/memory-lane-personal-memories-pictures-photographs
Your personal Memory Lane is a treasure trove of fantastic memories, says KATE WILLIAMS
The Express
5 November 2020
2 May 2021

Understanding, Country

“In a history book, you can't imagine, you can't speculate, you can't conjure new worlds because that would ruin the history book. .... And in a novel you can't have too much fact-dumping, too much history, it just doesn't work, too much footnoting, again that ruins the story. So I love the fact that I can do speculation and imagination in one and go wild in a novel and then do proper, scrupulous research in the other. I think they compliment each other.”

Kate Williams (historian) (1974) British historian

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/entertainment-arts-17945784
Meet the Author: Kate Williams
BBC
3 May 2012
2 May 2021

Thinking, Imagination, Books, World

“Let us resolve to be masters, not the victims, of our history, controlling our own destiny without giving way to blind suspicions and emotions.”

John F. Kennedy (1917–1963) 35th president of the United States of America

Way

“Common good also has a future dimension. Our task is hand over our country to the next generations better than we inherited that. One's own country must be continuously adjusted, renewed and modernised so that it would be sustainable. That is our duty towards the history.”

Egils Levits (1955) Latvian judge, jurist and politician

Source: Address given Assuming the Office / at the Saeima, https://www.president.lv/en/article/address-he-president-latvia-mr-egils-levits-assuming-office-saeima

Country, Future

“Latvian language, culture, history and world outlook do not belong to Latvians only. Everyone who identifies oneself with some minority is kindly welcome to participate in the life of the country by preserving one's minority culture, language, and traditions in parallel. It is a contribution to richness and diversity of Latvia's culture.”

Egils Levits (1955) Latvian judge, jurist and politician

Source: Address given Assuming the Office / at the Saeima, https://www.president.lv/en/article/address-he-president-latvia-mr-egils-levits-assuming-office-saeima

World, Country, Life

“If history was any guide, those best at violence might end up ruling over everyone else.”

Neal Stephenson book Seveneves

“Five Thousand Years Later” (p. 684)
Seveneves (2015), Part Three

“It is nonsense to say that generalization is foreign to history; history thrives on generalizations.”

Edward Hallett Carr What Is History?

Chap. 3 : History, Science and Morality
What is History? (1961)

“History does not so much repeat as echo, I suppose.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Source: Vorkosigan Saga, Cryoburn (2010), Chapter 13 (p. 257)

“I think that our comfort is in our history.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Thinking

“You need to study history, Doctor. All great changes are based on pain and destruction.”

John Twelve Hawks book The Traveler

Source: Fourth Realm Trilogy (2005-2009), The Traveler (2005), Ch. 35

Pain, Study, Change

“Always the victor writes the history of the vanquished. He who beats distorts the faces of the beaten. The weaker depart from this world and the lies remain.”

Bertolt Brecht book The Trial of Lucullus

The Trial of Lucullus (1940), Brecht Collected Plays, vol. 4, p. 386.

World

“It is all too easy to forget that there are emotional motivations in history, as well as economic ones.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

The Shaping of England (1969), p. 15
General sources

Motivation, Forgetting

“[S]cience has so changed its nature over... human history that no definition could be made to fit.”

John Desmond Bernal book Science in History

Preface
Science in History (1954)

Nature, Change

“Job growth is biggest in history.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2020, July 2020

“The history of economic growth is the history of people making more with less and shifting into new jobs that were unheard of in the previous generation.”

David R. Henderson (1950) American economist

“The Case for a Dynamic Economy,” Hoover Daily Report (Sept. 22, 2003)

People

“While the whole world is attracted and distracted by unnecessary criticism, music writes history.”

Prevale (1983) Italian DJ and producer

Original: (it) Mentre il mondo intero è attratto e distratto da critiche inutili, la musica scrive la storia.
Source: prevale.net

Music, World

“In reality, there is no truth in socialism, because it has never worked. Still smarting from the hard lessons of history, today's Marxist socialists have learned to swiftly bury truth and any truth-seekers, before they can become entombed themselves.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

“No Truth in Socialism: Why the ‘Crisis of Marxism’ Matters” https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/08/no_truth_in_socialism_why_the_crisis_of_marxism_matters.html American Thinker (Aug. 7, 2021)

Learning, Truth, Reality

“A law is a social monument, a page of history, a lesson in ethnography, a reason for state.”

Luís Gama (1830–1882) Brazilian lawyer, poet, abolitionist and journalist

Gazeta da Tarde, [Carta a Ferreira de Menezes], January 07, 1881. Source: Defendeu escravizados: O inestimável legado do jornalista Luiz Gama https://aventurasnahistoria.uol.com.br/noticias/reportagem/defendeu-escravizados-o-inestimavel-legado-do-jornalista-luiz-gama-.phtml.

Law

“Violence is the great attractor of human history.”

Robert Charles Wilson (1953) author

Source: Burning Paradise (2013), Chapter 29 (p. 278)

“Keep in mind, as a student of history, as I’m sure you are, never has Afghanistan been a united country, not in all of its history. Not in all of its history.”

Joe Biden (1942) 47th Vice President of the United States (in office from 2009 to 2017)

2021, July 2021, Remarks by President Biden on the Drawdown of U.S. Forces in Afghanistan

Country

“History is a combination of a lot of things. You can’t isolate events today and say, “Oh, well, this happened—those awful people.””

Joe Sacco (1960) Maltese-American cartoonist and journalist; pioneer of the Non-Fiction Graphic Novel (b. 1960)

The acts might be brutal, but there must be a context to it. I certainly didn’t want to drop the reader into those incidents without telling the story of, well: Why are there refugees? Why were the Israelis and the Palestinians battling along the border? Who were the fedayeen? What was the Israeli response to that? But more than that, I think, for me, the book ends up being—this is going to sound strange—a dead end. Because I don’t know where to go from here, except to delve into human psychology. I think I understand how history works. I understand why one people are battling another people. I understand that they both want land. But ultimately there’s a level that I haven’t really got to yet… On the multifaceted quality of history in “An Interview with Joe Sacco” https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-joe-sacco/ in Believer Magazine (2011 Jun 1)

People

“Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny.”

Richard Ebeling (1950) American economist

“Beware Democracy without Liberty” https://fee.org/articles/beware-democracy-without-liberty/, Foundation for Economic Education (FEE), (April 1, 2005)

Democracy

“For myself, I am totally convinced that these are the true happenings of our time; that, even as I write, these events are unfolding. As they further unfold, I believe they will prove to your fullest satisfaction that this is the true condition of our present time in history.”

Benjamin Creme (1922–2016) artist, author, esotericist

The Great Approach (2001) p. 1

Time

“One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.”

Yuval Noah Harari Sapiens

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Law

“Incomplete stories are make history of life. Their incompleteness makes them complete and generates curiosity in the readers, if the story is complete then it is read and kept aside, the incomplete story leaves its mark on the heart and mind of the reader and reader's start waiting for the end.”

Shabdon Ka Jahan

Waiting, Reading, Heart, Life

“We have become aware of the responsibility for our attitude towards the dark pages in our history. We have understood that bad service is done to the nation by those who are impelling to renounce that past. Such attitude leads to a moral self-destruction.”

Aleksander Kwaśniewski (1954) Polish politician, president of Poland

"Speech at the Jedwabne Ceremony" http://www.dialog.org/hist/kwasniewski.html (10 July 2001)

Past

“'Europe' had been on the defensive for a millennium. Now, for half a millennium, it conquered the world. Both observations make it impossible to sever European history from world history.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Chap. 17 : The Curious History of Europe
On History (1997)

World

“History as inspiration and ideology has a built-in tendency to become self-justifying myth. Nothing is a more dangerous blindfold than this, as the history of modern nations and nationalisms demonstrates.”

Eric Hobsbawm (1917–2012) British academic historian and Marxist historiographer

Chap. 3 : What Can History Tell Us about Contemporary Society?
On History (1997)

“If I could talk face to face with the pilot who dropped the bomb, I could tell him we cannot change history. But we should try to do good things for the present and for the future to promote peace.”

Phan Thi Kim Phuc (1963) Child depicted in the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph taken during the Vietnam War on June 8, 1972

"`Time To Heal, Time For Peace'" in Chicago Tribune https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6VPc2Y8SsL4J:https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1996-11-12-9611120185-story.html+&cd=21&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us (12 November 1996)

Change, Peace, Future

“Of course, I would like to go down in history as the man who brought peace.”

Nguyễn Văn Thiệu (1923–2001) president of South Vietnam from 1965–75

"Thieu Asks an Invasion of North If Paris Peace Negotiations Fail" in The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/1973/01/14/archives/thieu-asks-an-invasion-of-north-if-paris-peace-negotiations-fail.html (14 January 1973)

Peace

“I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the Church has done so often in human history."”

Francis George (1937–2015) Catholic cardinal

Replying to a question about the secularization of Western culture in a meeting with a group of priests on circa May 2010. Source: The Myth and the Reality of 'I'll Die in My Bed', Tim Drake, National Catholic Register, October 24, 2012, November 21, 2014 http://www.ncregister.com/blog/tim-drake/the-myth-and-the-reality-of-ill-die-in-my-bed,

Help

“There is nothing new under the sun when it comes to saving humanity. History always repeats itself.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Sun

“Those who claim that life begins at forty, they can't recall history, that Alexander became and died as the greatest without reaching this peak age. They also do not know those who die in their childhood.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

Childhood, Age, Life

“A society has many pasts from which it chooses those that go into the creation of its history. The choice is made by those in authority—the authority being of various kinds—although occasionally the voice of others may be heard.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

The Past as Present : Forging Contemporary Identities Through History

Past

“Epic literature is not history but is again a way of looking at the past.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

Source: Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, p. 100.

Literature, Way, Past

“Nationalism seeks legitimacy from the past and history therefore becomes a sensitive subject.”

Romila Thapar (1931) Indian historian

Source: Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300, p. 19.

Past

“History supplies us with examples of almost every possible modification of government.”

William Smith O'Brien (1803–1864) Irish nationalist politician (1803-1864)

p. 16 https://books.google.com/books?id=4VUBAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA16 Principles of Government: Or Meditations in Exile (1856), Chapter II. On Centralized and Local Administration

“Perhaps some deep-rooted atavism urges the wanderer back to lands which his ancestors left in the dim beginnings of history.”

W. Somerset Maugham book The Moon and Sixpence

Source: http://glimmertrain.com/documents/pdfs/MaughamQuote.pdf
Source: The Moon and Sixpence (1919), Ch. 50, p. 1??

“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book VI, ch. iii
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

Women

“Oh, history...you’ll be talking about reality next, as if it were something special too.”

Genevieve Cogman (1972) novelist and game designer

Source: The Masked City (2015), Chapter 15 (p. 201)

Reality

“In world history, those who have helped to build the same culture are not necessarily of one race, and those of the same race have not all participated in one culture. In scientific language, culture is not a function of race.”

Ruth Benedict (1887–1948) American anthropologist and folklorologist

Race: Science and Politics [1940], ch. 2

Help, World

“These two processes—linguistic philology and genetic phylogeny—are converging upon a common theme: the history of human migrations.”

Matt Ridley book Genome

Source: Genome (1999), Chapter 13 “Pre-History” (p. 185)

“I could be as jittery as you if I wanted to. But I've studied history and literature. And architecture, and a lot of things. Just to balance this psycho work. There’s a lot more perfection in a Doric column than in you.”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Source: Short fiction, The Fairy Chessmen (1946), Chapter 4 (p. 29)

Study, Perfection, Literature

“Without a sense of history, our expectations are the product of how we live now.”

David Fleming (1940–2010) British activist

Lean Logic, (2016), p. 152, entry on Expectations https://leanlogic.online/expectations/

Sense

“[W]e now face a demand to make choices that is unparalleled in human history.”

Barry Schwartz book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

The Paradox of Choice (2004)

“Scientists ignorant of history are not so much condemned to repeat it, as to be confused and unenterprising.”

Stephen Jay Gould book An Urchin in the Storm

"Exultation and Explanation", p. 187
An Urchin in the Storm (1987)

“We Croatians are suffering from an overdose of history during the past century. Of course we still have some nationalism. But the feelings are slowly cooling down.”

Zoran Milanović (1966) Croatian politician

Source: "'Germany Is a Role Model for Us'" in Speigel International https://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-croatian-prime-minister-milanovic-germany-is-a-role-model-a-856179.html (17 September 2012)

Past, Suffering, Feeling

“If history is to teach us anything, it must teach us that there is a continuity which binds together the present and the past, the East and the West. And no branch of history teaches that lesson more powerfully than the history of language and the history of religion.”

Max Müller (1823–1900) German-born philologist and orientalist

Religion, Past

“When you’re in this room, I don’t know how to describe it. It’s soaked in history. It just washes over you. I mean, it’s not even like it’s in the past. You’re in history. You’re in it.”

Stephen Colbert (1964) American political satirist, writer, comedian, television host, and actor

Source: " Stephen Colbert Tells Rep. Adam Schiff What Russian Oligarch Revealed About Trump 'Pee Tape' https://www.huffpost.com/entry/stephen-colbert-adam-schiff-pee-tape_n_616e2de7e4b00cb3cbd6ead0" (2021?)+videos

Past

“I've never claimed to have a monopoly of wisdom, but one thing I've learned in this job is you should always try to do the right thing, not the easy thing. Let the day-to-day judgments come and go: be prepared to be judged by history.”

Tony Blair (1953) former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Source: 2000s https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2003/mar/01/iraq.foreignpolicy The Guardian], 28 February, 2003.
Context: Jackie Ashley in Madrid, and Ewen MacAskill, "'History will be my judge': Tony Blair, in an exclusive interview, says demos and rebels will not deflect him over Iraq".

Learning, Wisdom

“The notion of cleansing history seems to me a huge mistake.”

Mark Sanford (1960) 115th Governor of South Carolina

Source: When talking about the removal of Confederate statues according to " I’m a citizen with no country:’ Mark Sanford on turning against Trump and his party https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/23/mark-sanford-republican-anti-trump" (August 23, 2021)

“[…] Abrupt climate change may be normal in the planet's history, or, to state it differently, that the earth's climate is inherently very unstable. The period in which human civilization developed has been if anything, an anomalous ten-thousand-year epoch of remarkable stability.”

James Howard Kunstler book The Long Emergency

Source: The Long Emergency (2005), Chapter 5, p. 149.

Change

“Jihad is the signature tune of Islamic history. If today’s Muslim rulers are reluctant to sound that note, it is often because they are concerned about the consequences of failure.”

M.J. Akbar (1951) journalist, author

Source: Akbar, M. J - The shade of swords_ Jihad and the conflict between Islam and christianity-Routledge (2008)

Failure

“You can take my freedom, even my life, but not my thought, not my truth, not my contribution to the history of the people to which I belong.”

Franjo Tuđman (1922–1999) Croatian politician, soldier and president

Source: "Excerpts from his diary, written while in prison" https://www.tudjman.hr/promisljanja/ (14 August 1984)

Freedom, People, Truth, Life

“All it demonstrates is the bullying rhetoric so common in the debate between the scientific and the secularist schools of Indian history.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Ayodhya: The Case Against the Temple (2002)

School

“Prolonged involvement with Parliament has in the end convinced me that the customary concentration on it as the centre of public affairs, however traditional it may be, is entirely misleading. This is a message, it seems to me, that needs to be absorbed into the general history of England.”

Geoffrey Elton (1921–1994) historian

Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, The Parliament of England, 1559-1581 (1986)

“There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scribes and policies.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Introduction p. I - XII

World, Way

“When several imperialist powers seek to plunder the weaker nations of the world, the result is an imperialist world war for the redistribution of colonies. And this crime, the most monstrous in world history, is committed by the bourgeoisie under the banner of “nationalism.””

Liu Shaoqi (1898–1969) 2nd President of the People's Republic of China (1898-1969)

Internationalism and Nationalism (1952) Source: "1.The Bourgeois-Nationalist Concept of the Nation" https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/liu-shaoqi/1952/internationalism_nationalism/ch01.htm

War, World

“Had I finished off France in '39, then world history would have taken another course. But then I had to wait until 1940. Then a two-front war, that was bad luck. After that, even we were broken.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Source: In a meeting with Mannerheim https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/oct/15/radio.internationalnews, 4 June 1942

Waiting, War, Bad luck, World

“There are those who can prove that plans and ideals for a united world and a well organized Brotherhood of Men have existed for hundreds of years and have come to nothing. These are the ones who say “Human nature cannot change!” There are others who declare that we are living through a momentous epoch in history which is ushering in stupendous changes and the possibility for real world unity and a new and better civilization.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Chapter I, Secrets Behind History

Nature, Men, World, Change

“There are two ways of summing up world history, the inner way and the outer way. Both have been at the mercy of scribes and policies. Let us begin by realizing that the story of human evolution has progressed steadily from complete exclusiveness to an ever-broadening inclusiveness.”

Vera Stanley Alder (1898–1984) British artist

Source: Humanity Comes of Age, A study of Individual and World Fulfillment (1950), Introduction p. I - XII

World, Way

“Natural history studies are fun, rewarding and an invaluable source of information.”

Helen Roy (1969) British ecologist and entomologist

Study, Nature

“Whether or not you choose to rise to that challenge is up to you. Either way, history will judge you.”

Greta Thunberg (2003) Swedish climate change activist

2021, An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate (October 2021) Source: "An Open Letter to the Global Media by Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate" https://time.com/6111851/greta-thunberg-vanessa-nakate-open-letter-media/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=editorial&utm_term=ideas_&linkId=137945320, TIME (29 October 2021)

Way

“We strongly condemn all attempts to rewrite history, reduce the number of victims and minimize contribution to the defeat of Nazism and fascism, as well as attempts to rehabilitate those ideologists.”

Ivica Dačić (1966) Serbian politician

Source: "Ivica Dacic: Serbia and Russia are more than just historical friends and allies" in The State Duma http://duma.gov.ru/en/news/51667/ (2 June 2021)

“While the inner sciences have a long history in countries such as India, Tibet and China, they have never rejected the outer sciences, and there has never been a conflict between dharma and science as there has been between Western religion and science.”

Rajiv Malhotra book Being Different

Source: Being Different: An Indian Challenge to Western Universalism (2011)

Religion, Country, Science

“The key to implementation is people. In a war, even you have a good fighting strategy, history tells us that having soldiers who are brave enough, with skills in shooting and fighting, is what makes the difference.”

Liu Chuanzhi (1944) Chinese businessman

Source: Lenovo Group’s Liu Chuanzhi on ‘Building a Healthy Company’ https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/lenovo-groups-liu-chuanzhi-on-building-a-healthy-company/ in Knowledge @ Wharton (8 July 2009)

War, People, Fight

“In a world of fake news, fake history, fake law, fake diplomacy, it is no surprise to encounter fake democracy along the way.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

2021

Democracy, Law, Way, World

“We are sleepwalking into a mass extinction event - the sixth in our planet's history, and the first to be caused by human economic activity. The rate of extinction is now 1,000 times faster than before the Industrial Revolution.”

Jason Hickel (1982) author

Source: Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World (2021), Welcome to the Anthropocene, p. 8

Time

“We are a sovereign country so we must get out from this crisis by ourselves. We must draw away danger with our own hands. History would never forgive the present generation for wasting this chance.”

Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014) Polish military officer and politician

Source: Excerpts of Martial law speech (14 December 1981)

Drawing, Forgiveness, Chance, Country

“Citizens. Great is the burden of responsibility that falls on me at this dramatic moment in Polish history. It is my duty to take this responsibility. Poland’s future is at stake-the future for which my generation fought and for which it gave the best years of its life.”

Wojciech Jaruzelski (1923–2014) Polish military officer and politician

Source: Excerpts of Martial law speech (14 December 1981)

Future, Life

“Those who forget their ancestors, betray the motherland or split the country will never come to a good end and will surely be spurned by the people and judged by history.”

Zhu Fenglian (1977)

Source: https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-says-it-will-hold-supporters-taiwans-independence-criminally-responsible-2021-11-05/ "China spurs Taiwan anger with criminal liability threat for independence supporters" in Reuters] (5 November 2021)

Country, Forgetting, People

“In history there are no authorities: history is a free study in which no man can claim rule, or credence for his mere ipse dixit, and in which the only true sin is to deny a hearing to views with which one happens to disagree.”

Geoffrey Elton (1921–1994) historian

Source: Geoffrey Rudolph Elton, 'Presidential Address: The Historian's Social Function' (1976)

Study

“An accurate history should not only record the periods of glory but the moments of degeneration, of the missed opportunities, and of the failure to forge national unity at crucial junctures in time. It should draw lessons for the future generations from costly errors in the past.”

Subramanian Swamy (1939) Indian politician

2015-Present
Source: Foreword by Subramanian Swamy in Atri, N., & Sagar, M. A. (2017). Brainwashed republic.

Drawing, Failure, Time, Past

“If we disown history we are at its mercy. To have a reasonable knowledge of the past is to possess an anchor which is likely to prevent us from being swept towards false ideas about the present and future.”

Geoffrey Blainey (1930) Australian historian

Source: The Great Seesaw: A New View of the Western World, 1750-2000 (1988)

Falseness, Idea, Past, Future

“History is written by the survivors, a narrative they compose to explain events to themselves. So the historicity of journals like this one—their accuracy and authenticity—is a function of the reliability of the narrator.”

Charles Stross The Laundry Files

Source: The Laundry Files, The Labyrinth Index (2018), Chapter 8, “A Game of Vampires” (p. 244)

“For those impervious to history, only sterilization and quarantine are efficacious.”

Sheri S. Tepper (1929–2016) American fiction writer

Source: The Margarets (2007), Chapter 53, “We Margarets Walk” (p. 507)

“You can't question a people's history and you can't insult the Algerians.”

Abdelmadjid Tebboune (1945) Algerian politician, current President of Algeria

Source: Abdelmadjid Tebboune (2021) cited in: " "You Can’t Question a People’s History and You Can’t Insult the Algerians" https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/algerian-president-abdelmadjid-tebboune-you-can-t-question-a-people-s-history-and-you-can-t-insult-the-algerians-a-44033dcb-53b4-4660-8e24-44aff8756c2e" in SPIEGEL International, 9 November 2021.

People, Question

“My family history is made of migration; it’s something that’s part of my own complexity.”

Mati Diop (1982) French actress and film director

Source: On her family background that includes an immigrant parent in “Atlantics director Mati Diop: ‘As a mixed-race girl, there’s a visible and invisible side of you'” https://www.theguardian.com/film/2019/nov/09/atlantics-director-mati-diop-as-a-mixed-race-girl-theres-always-a-visible-and-invisible-side-of-you in The Guardian (2019 Nov 9)

Family, Parting

“The dynamic earth has been spewing out the constituents of evolution and progress throughout its history, nurturing all species from the very first forms of life to our own.”

Shawna Vogel science writer

Naked Earth: the New Geophysics (1995)

Life

“Those who want to be among the Ethiopian children, who will be hailed by history, rise up for your country today. Let's meet at the front.”

Abiy Ahmed (1976) Ethiopian Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize laureate

Source: Abiy Ahmed (2021) cited in: " Ethiopia civil war: How PM Abiy led fight-back against rebel advance https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-59552888" in BBC News, 16 December 2021.

Country, Children

“Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.”

Buchi Emecheta (1944–2017) author

Source: On how Black women should challenge historical representations (as quoted in “Buchi Emecheta: Nigerian author who championed girls dies aged 72” https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38757048 in BBC News in BBC News; 2017 Jan 26)

Way, World, Women

“The literature of India makes us acquainted with a great nation of past ages, which grasped every branch of knowledge, and which will always occupy a distinguished place in the history of the civilization of mankind.”

Magnus Björnstjerna (1779–1847) Swedish count and general (1779-1847)

Source: Count Magnus Fredrik Ferdinand Bjornstjerna in: The Theogony of the Hindoos with Their System of Philosophy and Cosmogony by Count M. Björnstjerna https://books.google.co.in/books?id=mHNK92IkdUkC&pg=PA85, Murray, 1844 , p. 85.

Literature, Age, Past, Knowledge

“There is only one way to get the change we need - and that is to vote to go; because all EU history shows that they only really listen to a population when it says no.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

Source: EU referendum: Leaving EU a 'leap in the dark' says Cameron https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-35634239 BBC News (22 February 2016)

Way, Change

“Our local representatives do not participate in the deliberations. Of course, they are not member of parliaments like you, but we are each other's neighbors, share a common history and in many ways, we are each other's fellow sufferers.”

Edison Rijna (1967) Dutch politician on Bonaire

Source: Edison Rijna (2021) cited in: " IPKO should develop friendship between Kingdom countries https://www.curacaochronicle.com/post/main/ipko-should-develop-friendship-between-kingdom-countries/" in Curaçao Chronicle, 24 August 2021.

Suffering, Way

“Except for a few special cases, title to every parcel of real property derives from an act of violence, more or less remote, and ownership is only as valid as the strength and will required to maintain it. That is the lesson of history, whether you like it or not.”

Jack Vance book The Gray Prince

“The mourning of defeated peoples, while pathetic and tragic, is usually futile,” said Kelse.
Source: The Gray Prince (1975 [serialized 1974]), Chapter 16 (p. 159)

“I have actually sat down to make a distinct History of the Norman Conquest, which I can do easier than anybody else, as I have worked so much at the subject for twenty years past, that is, a great part of the story; there will be little more to do than to write down what is already in my head.”

Edward Augustus Freeman (1823–1892) English historian (1823-1892)

Source: Letter to Dean Hook (23 December 1865), quoted in W. R. W. Stephens, The Life and Letters of Edward A. Freeman, Volume I (1895), p. 335

Past, Parting

“The much bigger thing is that we as human beings shepherd and create our intellectual history as a civilization. And it is that intellectual history on the shelf that we can pull off the shelf to do stuff, and to avoid doing the dumb things again, because somebody already did the dumb thing and wrote about their experience and we don't need to do it again. There are several processes that are creating that record, and other processes where people are trying to destroy bits of that record, and others that are trying to prevent people from putting things into that record in the first place. We all live off that intellectual record. So what we want to do is get as much into the record, prevent as much as possible being deleted from the record, and then make the record as searchable as possible.”

Julian Assange book When Google Met Wikileaks

Source: Julian Assange, "When Google Met Wikileaks" (ORbooks, New York, 2014), p.124

People

“We stand now at the turning point between two eras. Behind us is a past to which we can never return ... The coming of the rocket brought to an end a million years of isolation ... the childhood of our race was over and history as we know it began.”

Arthur C. Clarke (1917–2008) British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, undersea explorer, and television series host

Source: Exploration of Space (1952)

Childhood, Past

“[I]mpeachment does not require proof of a crime... The argument that only criminal offenses are impeachable is deeply and profoundly wrong. It misunderstands the Constitution, U.S. history, and the nature of criminal law in important ways.”

Laurence Tribe (1941) American lawyer and law school professor

To End a Presidency (2018)

Law, Nature, Way

“I intend to act as tough as possible ... Together we will overcome this black period in the history of Kazakhstan.”

Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (1953) Kazakh politician

Source: Kassym-Jomart Tokayev (2021) cited in: " State of emergency in Kazakhstan as Tokayev asks CSTO's help https://www.dailysabah.com/world/asia-pacific/state-of-emergency-in-kazakhstan-as-tokayev-asks-cstos-help" in Daily Sabah, 5 January 2021.

“Wealth that can last generations can now be attained in the shortest time ever in history.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Future Proofing You (2021)

Time, Wealth

Quotes about history page 56

Quotes about history
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