“We knew nothing but despotism. That is why the very rich Mughal empire could break up into nothing. Turn to dust at the merest touch of a foreign power. There was no institution, there was no creative nation, no university, no printing press, there was nothing but personal power. …. How do you ignore history? But the nationalist movement, independence movement ignored it. You read the Glimpses of World History by Jawaharlal Nehru, it talks about the mythical past and then it jumps the difficult period of the invasions and conquests. So you have Chinese pilgrims coming to Bihar, Nalanda and places like that. Then somehow they don't tell you what happens, why these places are in ruin. They never tell you why Elephanta island is in ruins or why Bhubaneswar was desecrated. So history has to be studied, it is very painful history. But it is not more painful than most countries have had. …It isn't India alone that has had a rough time, that has to be understood. But the rough time has to be faced and it cannot be glossed over. There are tools for us to understand the rough time. We can read a man like Ibn Battuta who will tell you what it was like to be there in the midst of the fourteenth century, terrible times. An apologist of the invaders would like to gloss that over. But it would be wrong to gloss that over, that has to be understood. …But I would like to see this past recovered and not dodged.”
V.S. Naipaul, Interview, with URMI GOSWAMI, JANUARY 14, 2003 0 'How do you ignore history?' https://web.archive.org/web/20070106194746/http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/cms.dll/html/comp/articleshow?artid=34295982
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V.S. Naipaul 34
Trinidadian-British writer of Indo-Nepalese ancestry 1932–2018Related quotes
Source: The Beach (1941), Chapter 4, p. 25
Gompers, Samuel. The Samuel Gompers Papers. Stuart Bruce Kaufman, Peter J. Albert, Grace Palladino, and Marla J Hughes, eds. Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2000, p. 137.
How I do my computing (2006)
2000s
“History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.”
Quoted in Gert Jonkers, "Gore Vidal, the Fantastic Man," Butt, No. 20 (7 April 2007)
2000s
Context: Everybody likes a bit of gossip to some point, as long as it’s gossip with some point to it. That’s why I like history. History is nothing but gossip about the past, with the hope that it might be true.
Source: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-become-historian-without-studying-history-in-University
“If you could pack for heaven, this was how you'd do it, touching everything, taking nothing.”
Source: Have a Little Faith: a True Story
“History is nothing whatever but a record of what living persons have done in the past.”
Give Me Liberty (1936)
“The trouble is, you can ignore history—but history won’t necessarily ignore you.”
Source: The Laundry Files, The Fuller Memorandum (2010), Chapter 5, “Lost in Committee” (p. 87)
On communicating with other like-minded individuals in “Mary H.K. Choi, Author of ‘Emergency Contact’ (Interview)” https://ilymag.com/2018/05/08/mary-h-k-choi-author-of-emergency-contact-interview/ in Ily Magazine (2018 May 8)