Quotes on History

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

The history of the world - by which, of course, we mean Europe - is a record of intertribal lacerations, of ethnic cleansings.

I think the history of western feminism is one that is fraught with racism, and I think it's important to acknowledge that and, at the same time, to say that feminism is not the western invention, that my great-grandmother in what is now south-western Nigeria is feminist.

The scum of the earth... but what fine soldiers we have made them.

Women's tennis has been around for a very long time - we're talking about the 1800s. But women's soccer hasn't had such a long history, so now they're right at the beginning of really trying to make things equal. We need to continue not only to advocate for women but to have men advocating for women.

When I was growing up reading history books as a young student, it seemed all wars had a winner. Yet in today's wars, it is increasingly clear that no one wins. Everyone loses.

Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.

I am just getting into Zora Neale Hurston, who is possibly a much better writer than the critics and rivals who tried to erase her from history, resulting in a life in which she worked as a maid and died in a welfare nursing home. She's clever. She does something modern to the sentence.

Anyone who believes you can't change history has never tried to write his memoirs.

Why climb? That's a question that baffles me. It perplexes me. I really asked that a lot on Everest. I can't justify it. I can't say it's for a good cause. All I can say is look at the history of exploration: it's full of vainglorious pursuits.

Most Americans are exceptionalists; we think we live outside of history.

Our mental maps are distorted by who are the 'winners' of history and who are the powers of today.

When the dust settles and the pages of history are written, it will not be the angry defenders of intolerance who have made the difference. The reward will go to those who dared to step outside the safety of their privacy in order to expose and rout the prevailing prejudices.

I don't see why a book shouldn't be intellectually sound, entertaining, and fun to read. Historians who write academic history, which is unreadable, are basically wasting their time.

Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.

There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.

All of history misses out on the history of the soul. Human passions are so often not included in history.

And history becomes legend and legend becomes history.

History is the only true teacher, the revolution the best school for the proletariat.

I think history shows that countries have to have some kind of a threshold level of economic success before they begin to have the means and the will to focus on the environment.

For much of history it was possible to believe that the great diversity of life on Earth was a fixed creation, that the living world had never changed. But when the first stirrings of industry demanded that fuel be dug from the earth and hillsides be leveled for roads and railways, the Earth's true past was dug up in abundance.