Quotes on History

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

Statutes authorizing unreasonable searches were the core concern of the framers of the 4th Amendment.

Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

We can make war so terrible and make them so sick of war that generations pass away before they again appeal to it.

History has shown that one cannot legislate a culture of integrity. And yet, one of the paramount responsibilities and challenges of corporate leadership is to ensure such a culture.

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

Maybe if people started to listen, history would stop repeating itself.

The case against the notion of historical objectivity is like the case against international law, or international morality; that it does not exist.

History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.

Nigeria has had a complicated colonial history. My work has examined that part of our story extensively.

The best time to plan a book is while you're doing the dishes.

I had this feeling that, somehow, we ought to be teaching not just the history of particular nations or particular regions, but the history of humanity.

I woke up one day and thought: 'I want to write a book about the history of my body.' I could justify talking about my mother because it was in her body that my body began.

History is always best written generations after the event, when clouded fact and memory have all fused into what can be accepted as truth, whether it be so or not.

If I would be born in New Zealand, maybe, I would never write the Polish Requiem or pieces which were connected with the history of war. But this was my childhood. War was the main subject, and also in our family.

The Great Migration can get forgotten if we don't pay attention or bear witness to it. It's part of my personal history and the history of millions of African Americans who left those oppressive conditions for better lives in the North. It's important to put that on the page.

The women of this country ought be enlightened in regard to the laws under which they live, that they may no longer publish their degradation by declaring themselves satisfied with their present position, nor their ignorance, by asserting that they have all the rights they want.

Human nature will not change. In any future great national trial, compared with the men of this, we shall have as weak and as strong, as silly and as wise, as bad and as good. Let us therefore study the incidents in this as philosophy to learn wisdom from and none of them as wrongs to be avenged.

Empire in the past was always a far harsher and much more accident-prone business than conventional history books imply. And the costs of these overseas invasions were borne not just by those on the receiving end but - frequently - by ordinary, vulnerable people among or associated with the invaders.

Strive not to be a success, but rather to be of value.

Cautious, careful people, always casting about to preserve their reputation and social standing, never can bring about a reform. Those who are really in earnest must be willing to be anything or nothing in the world's estimation.