6,230 Quotes About History

To me, history ought to be a source of pleasure. It isn't just part of our civic responsibility. To me, it's an enlargement of the experience of being alive, just the way literature or art or music is."[The Title Always Comes Last; NEH 2003 Jefferson Lecturer interview profile]

L'unica rivoluzione che serve, [è] quella dentro di te. Le altre le vedi. Le altre si ripetono, si ripetono in maniera costante, perché al fondo c'è la natura dell'uomo. E se l'uomo non cambia, se l'uomo non fa questo salto di qualità, se l'uomo non rinuncia alla violenza, al dominio della materia, al profitto, all'interesse, tutto si ripete, si ripete, si ripete.

I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future - the timelessness of the rocks and the hills - all the people who have existed there. I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show.

Political judgment is the ability to hear the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.

So Rwandan history is dangerous. Like all of history, it is a record of successive struggles for power, and to a very large extent power consists in the ability to make others inhabit your story of their reality - even, as is so often the case, when that story is written in their blood.

When we're in the story, when we're part of it, we can't know the outcome. It's only later that we think we can see what the story was. But do we ever really know? And does anybody else, perhaps, coming along a little later, does anybody else really care? ... History is written by the survivors, but what is that history? That's the point I was trying to make just now. We don't know what the story is when we're in it, and even after we tell it we're not sure. Because the story doesn't end.

We often hear about stepping outside ourselves, but rarely about stepping outside our generation.

Outside you actions don’t exist, outside you history doesn’t exist, outside you future doesn’t exist.

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.