History Quotes

Mohammad never assigned himself a status more than a common man and a messenger of God. People had faith in him when he was surrounded by poverty and adversity and trusted him while he was the ruler of a great Empire. He was a man of spotless character who always had confidence in himself and in God's help. No aspect of his life remained hidden nor was his death a mysterious event.

~ M.h. Hyndman

When ready to settle down: women are more interested in where the man is going, men are more interested in where the woman has been.

~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

It is surprising to me that one of the great crimes of history has gone unnoticed; the abduction of god by religions. This slight-of-hand has been the cause of countless blood-shed and has been found at the root of innumerable acts of evil. The argument continues today, as to which religion the true god belongs, when what would be most healing and empowering is to free god from the shackles of religious limitation and judgment. It is by emancipating god from the ignorance of our ancestors that we become empowered to explore and express our own relationship with what god may or may not be.

~ Steve Maraboli

There had been no crises of incident, or marked movements of experience such as in Felipe's imaginations of love were essential to the fulness of its growth. This is a common mistake on the part of those who have never felt love's true bonds. Once in those chains, one perceives that they are not of the sort full forged in a day. They are made as the great iron cables are made, on which bridges are swung across the widest water-channels,--not of single huge rods, or bars, which would be stronger, perhaps, to look at; but myriads of the finest wires, each one by itself so fine, so frail, it would barely hold a child's kite in the wind: by hundreds, hundreds of thousands of such, twisted, re-twisted together, are made the mighty cables, which do not any more swerve from their place in the air, under the weight and jar of the ceaseless traffic and tread of two cities, than the solid earth swerves under the same ceaseless weight and jar. Such cables do not break.

~ Helen Hunt Jackson

Don’t judge me by my past. I don’t live there anymore.

~ Auliq Ice

The gospel is not mere forgiveness or grace, empty of content, but always refers to Jesus. So the gospel is good news about a human person who is God in our history, our world and who came to accomplish something in his life death and resurrection.

~ William Mcdavid

It is then he realises that certain things loom larger than forgiveness and reconciliation: memory, for one, and history, bloody history.

~ Omar Musa

People that hold onto hate for so long do so because they want to avoid dealing with their pain. They falsely believe if they forgive they are letting their enemy believe they are a doormat. What they don’t understand is hatred can’t be isolated or turned off. It manifests in their health, choices and belief systems. Their values and religious beliefs make adjustments to justify their negative emotions. Not unlike malware infesting a hard drive, their spirit slowly becomes corrupted and they make choices that don’t make logical sense to others. Hatred left unaddressed will crash a person’s spirit. The only thing he or she can do is to reboot, by fixing him or herself, not others. This might require installing a firewall of boundaries or parental controls on their emotions. Regardless of the approach, we are all connected on this network of life and each of us is responsible for cleaning up our spiritual registry.

~ Shannon L. Alder

If you could not accept the past and its burden there was no future, for without one there cannot be the other.

~ Robert Penn Warren

On any basic figure of the Africans landed alive in the Americas, one would have to make several extensions- starting with a calculation to cover mortality in transshipment. The Atlantic crossing, or “Middle Passage,” as it was called by European slavers, was notorious for the number of deaths incurred, averaging in the vicinity of 15-20 per cent. There were also numerous deaths in Africa between time of capture and time of embarkation, especially in cases where captives had to travel hundreds of miles to the coast. Most important of all (given that warfare was the principal means of obtaining captives) it is necessary to make some estimate of the number of people killed and injured so as to extract the millions who were taken alive and sound. The resultant figure would be many times the millions landed alive outside of Africa, and it is that figure which represents the number of Africans directly removed from the population and labor force of Africa because of the establishment of slave production by Europeans. Pg. 96

~ Walter Rodney

For the human memory is short, and even when we write it in stone we quickly forget and the stones crumble and even those stones then forget.

~ Stant Litore

The sense that everything is going wrong has existed in every era, and rightly so since men have found no greater pleasure than in inventing new ways to make each other miserable.

~ Emil M. Cioran

He used to say that he never felt the hardness of the human struggle or the sadness of history as he felt it among those ruins. He used to say, too, that it made one feel an obligation to do one's best.

~ Willa Cather

precious laughing time is wasted, because I have to put up with Satan's stupid minions who smile without attempting to anger somebody else - leave us alone already.

~ A Gentlemen

It is not death that allows us to understand each other, but poetry.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

The present is not so glorious but that I should wish to dwell a little in the past.

~ Emmuska Orczy

I see a cathedral, for instance, one that’s stood for centuries and I marvel and I wonder... How many people passed through the doors? What did they pray for? How many wars did they wish to see ended? How many christenings, weddings, and funerals? Same thing with a record, I guess. Who bought it? Did they ever make love while it was playing? How many times did they read the notes in the cover? Did a song on the album change their life? I suppose it's odd to think about things like that.

~ Benjamin R. Smith

Libraries are sanctuaries from the world and command centers onto it: here in the quiet rooms are the lives of Crazy Horse and Aung San Suu Kyi, the Hundred Years' War and the Opium Wars and the Dirty War, the ideas of Simone Weil and Lao-Tzu, information on building your sailboat or dissolving your marriage, fictional worlds and books to equip the reader to reenter the real world. They are, ideally, places where nothing happens and where everything that has happened is stored up to be remembered and relived, the place where the world is folded up into boxes of paper. Every book is a door that opens onto another world, which might be the magic that all those children's books were alluding to, and a library is a Milky Way of worlds.

~ Rebecca Solnit

Better to have to retrace your steps and then move forward than never to move forward at all.

~ Anne Burack Sayre

Never make enemies of anyone younger or healthier than you are. They write your history.

~ Jacob M. Appel

Its really hard to recall the day you became friends with special people.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

As we were told about others, so others will be told about us. that is HISTORY. and the most painfull thing about it is that, it does not repeat itself. it comes onece in life and never again.

~ Hamzat Haruna Ribah

History chews up sexually uncertain boys, and spits us out as recycled, generic greeting cards for lonely old men.

~ Andrew Smith

Great men have always preferred women of the prostitute type.

~ Otto Weininger

They say God appeared in history and used it for his purposes, but if that was so he had no pity for men.

~ Bernard Malamud

David Stern might be the smartest executive in the history of professional sports. His obsession with the Vagrant Kings is one of the strangest stories.

~ R.e. Graswich

There is no need to rush in life. Just with one word at a time, your sweet life history will be written boldly in capitals and highlighted for easy access. Be sure you are passing the test of patience!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

I heard my teacher said great people make history. I am not concern about great or people or history. I am concerned about make and it keeps me asking the next question how?! They are Determined and Disciplined!

~ Israelmore Ayivor

It is ashamed that history isolates things that are common to a large populace, but families don’t disperse generational history to prevent their descendants from falling in the same traps as they had.

~ Stephen And Tiffany Domena

In my dream I drank fully of water, but when I woke, I was thirsty. Ned Low

~ Patricia Goodwin

...and Věra said that every time we reached the page which described the snow falling through the branches of the trees, soon to shroud the entire forest floor, I would look up at her and ask: But if it's all white, how do the squirrels know where they've buried their hoard?... Those were your very words, the question which constantly troubled you. How indeed do the squirrels know, what do we know ourselves, how do we remember, and what it is we find in the end?

~ W.g. Sebald

Preservation of the past has been one of humankind’s chief preoccupations for centuries, although I am not convinced much of it is worth preserving.

~ Chris Flynn

Nothing is long ago in an archive, my dear. In the records we treat the dead as same as the living.
that’s the whole point of keeping papers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred years or only a few weeks. It’s all filed away, fresh as the day it went under the covers.

~ Sara Sheridan

This is the story I am working on. But it isn't complete as I don't have the right way to begin. I sit on the crosshouse floor and look at the objects. I see different ways they could be put together and the way the story changes over time. The objects fall into their groupings and they talk to each other in different fashions depending on where they're put and at first it makes me panic. I put the memories together again and again in their different patterns and try to understand which is the correct way. Then at last I see that there isn't one. I see that if I am lucky and do it right, the story will not ever come together in one final meaning. Because there is not yet any end.

~ Anna Smaill

To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger.

~ Walter Benjamin

But however minimal, however threadbare, it (collective memory) is ballast of a kind. We all need that seven-eighths of the iceberg, the ballast of the past, a general past, the place from which we came.That is why history should be taught in school. to all children, as much of it as possible. If you have no sense of the past, no access to historical narrative, you are afloat, untethered; you cannot see yourself as a part of the narrative, you cannot place yourself within a context. You will not have an understanding of time, and a respect for memory and its subtle victory over the remorselessness of time.

~ Penelope Lively

...first, in order to remember, something must be forgotten; second, the place where memories are stored has no boundaries. In other words, forgetting is a twin; its tandem effect is best called simultancous distraction, the instant when one memory defoliates another. This fuzzy double - one devouring the other - presumably inhibits learning

~ Norman Klein

The assassination of Allende quickly covered over the memory of the Russian invasion of Bohemia, the bloody massacre in Bangladesh caused Allende to be forgotten, the din of war in the Sinai Desert drowned out the groans of Bangladesh, the massacres in Cambodia caused the Sinai to be forgotten, and so on, and on and on, until everyone has completely forgotten everything.

~ Milan Kundera

You may ask why I write. And yet my reasons are quite many. For it is not unusual in human beings who have witnessed the sack of a city or the falling to pieces of a people to desire to set down what they have witnesses for the benefit of unknown heirs or of generations infinitely remote; or, if you please, just to get the sight out of their heads.

~ Ford Madox Ford

Facts you can bend. Memories are much stronger things.

~ Isvari