Quotes on History

For too long, history has imposed a binary condition on its black citizens: either nameless or renowned, menial or exceptional, passive recipients of the forces of history or superheroes who acquire mythic status not just because of their deeds but because of their scarcity.

I love my people's history. I feel a huge responsibility to tell the stories of my past and my ancestors' past.

There's a big mistake that people make with history, which is to think that people in the past were just like us, but wearing crinolines. They lived in different worlds.

Much of how Americans have always understood their history, culture, and identity depends on positioning Europe as the 'other,' as that 'old world' against which they define themselves.

There comes a time in the life of every nation when it stands at the crossroads of history and must choose which way to go.

I don't fight for the money. I fight for my legacy. I fight for history. I fight for my people.

Philosophy is tested and characterised by the way in which it appropriates its history.

For children, diversity needs to be real and not merely relegated to learning the names of the usual suspects during Black History Month or enjoying south-of-the-border cuisine on Cinco de Mayo. It means talking to and spending time with kids not like them so that they may discover those kids are in fact just like them.

If you read enough biography and history, you learn how people have dealt successfully or unsuccessfully with similar situations or patterns in the past. It doesn't give you a template of answers, but it does help you refine the questions you have to ask yourself.

I think we are always right to worry about damaging consequences of new technologies even as we are empowered by them. History suggests we should not panic nor be too sanguine about cool new gizmos. There's a delicate balance.

I've been fortunate over my career to make a little history on the 16th hole at Augusta National.

No individual is isolated. He who is sad, saddens others.

I have set my life upon a cast, And I will stand the hazard of the die.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Real solemn history, I cannot be interested in.... The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars and pestilences in every page; the men all so good for nothing, and hardly any women at all.

During my lifetime I have dedicated myself to this struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.

The more abstract the truth you wish to teach, the more must you allure the senses to it.

Presume not that I am the thing I was.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.

Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.