#History

"I tell you, lad, that men will believe is one says, "The Gods say..."They will believe if one says, "I had a Vision..."They will believe if one says, "It was told me on a tablet of hidden gold..."But, if one says, "History teaches,"then they will not believe."

"We can't understand when we're pregnant, or when our siblings are expecting, how profound it is to have a shared history with a younger generation: blood, genes, humor. It means we were actually here, on Earth, for a time - like the Egyptians with their pyramids, only with children."

"The best moments in reading are when you come across something – a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things – which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and taken yours."

"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else."

"Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny."

"Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners."

"You show me a capitalist, and I'll show you a bloodsucker"

"I'm interested in the way in which the past affects the present and I think that if we understand a good deal more about history, we automatically understand a great more about contemporary life."

"Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present."

"We learn from experience that men never learn anything from experience."

"History repeats itself, but the special call of an art which has passed away is never reproduced. It is as utterly gone out of the world as the song of a destroyed wild bird."

"Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined ... Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded ... The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding."

"I don't care what is written,"Meyer Landsman says. "I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It's in my ex-wife's tote bag."

"How was life before Pop-Tarts, Prozac and padded playgrounds? They ate strudel, took opium and played on the grass."

"The history of science is the saga of nature defying common sense."

"He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth."

"Learn from your history, but don’t live in it."

"Do you really believe ... that everything historians tell us about men – or about women – is actually true? You ought to consider the fact that these histories have been written by men, who never tell the truth except by accident."

"It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans."

"Those unable to catalog the past are doomed to repeat it."