Historical Quotes - Page 34

• History, well taught, is the demythologising of the past... Take any important issue of our time - Northern Ireland, Nuclear Disarmament, Race, The Welfare State, South Africa - and it becomes impossible to seriously confront any of them without understanding their historical background.

  Alan Bullock

  Past, Race, Nuclear Disarmament

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• There is a profound hypocrisy - and deep historical ignorance - when Europeans complain about the problems posed by the ethnic and religious minorities in their midst, for that is exactly what European colonial rule meant for peoples around the world.

  Martin Jacques

  Religious, Ignorance, Profound

  "Europe's contempt for other cultures can't be sustained" by Martin Jacques, www.theguardian.com. February 17, 2006.

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• Through its imperialist system Britain brought about untold suffering of millions of people. And this is an historical fact. To be able to admit this would increase the respect, you know, which we have for British institutions.

  Nelson Mandela

  People, Suffering, Able

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• One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.

  Zhou Enlai

  Memories, Delightful, Delightful Things

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• Doctor Mengele is such a powerful character historically, as powerful as Nazism itself, so these subjects always tend to be the protagonists. What I think is that despite this historical references, Wakolda or The German Doctor is a very intimate story.

  Lucia Puenzo

  Powerful, Character, Thinking

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• In general, even if I'm dealing with a historical subject, I begin with invention rather than investigation, because I need to understand what is going to be the voice or the tone of the story.

  Lucia Puenzo

  Voice, Needs, Stories

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• I think that even though The German Doctor (Wakolda) is placed in a historical context , it is a very intimate story. The film has been extremely well received around the world. It keeps on going around, opening in different markets, and connecting with the audience. In Argentina it was seen by over 450, 000 spectators, which is way more than anything we could have imagined.

  Lucia Puenzo

  Thinking, Doctors, Different

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• There's a natural tendency to sanitize and polish any historical icon whether it be George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Martin Luther King saying, "I have a dream."

  Taylor Branch

  Dream, Kings, Icons

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• The true story is that black people need to tell their history. Very few films are made by black people about slavery. That itself is a crime because slavery is a very important historical event that has held our people hostage. Forget white people's role in it. In the end what's important is black people remain and live with the scars and psychological issues.

  Haile Gerima

  White, Issues, People

  Source: blogs.indiewire.com

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• What does anyone really know about the impetus to go to war? And so much is uncovered in hindsight. And there are aspects of even past wars that are only coming out now. Historians discover letters here, notes there, and look very carefully at different aspects of not only any conflict but any great historical event.

  Jacqueline Winspear

  War, Past, Events

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• It's really important in any historical fiction, I think, to anchor the story in its time. And you do that by weaving in those details, by, believe it or not, by the plumbing.

  Jacqueline Winspear

  Believe, Thinking, Anchors

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Mitterrand had a sense for symbols, and he was the first Socialist president since 1958. He wanted to show that there is historical continuity, a connection with the great figures of French history.

  Francois Hollande

  President, Connections, Firsts

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• I believe that at the beginning of the life of every artist there is some kind of trauma. We have a problem and all of our life we try to speak about this problem. My trauma was historical. When I was three or four, all the friends of my parents were survivors of the Holocaust; they spoke a lot about that. My father was hiding during the war, it was something totally present when I was a boy. It is sure that it has made me.

  Christian Boltanski

  Father, War, Believe

  "To die is very strange". Interview with Caia Hagel, logger.believermag.com. March 12, 2014.

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• There's a lot more historical baggage to deal with as a wife than as a partner.

  Alison Pill

  Wife, Baggage, Partners

  Interview with Sheila Heti, believermag.com. February 1, 2013.

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• Anyway I read more contemporary poetry than contemporary fiction so my mind goes first to a kind of crass "conceptualism" that repeats vanguard gestures of the past minus the politics and historical context.

  Ben Lerner

  Past, Contemporary Fiction, Mind

  "Despair strikes me as eminently reasonable and boring". Interview with Tao Lin, believermag.com. September 2014.

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• I do want to write about social/cultural/historical context. I'm interested in relationships, in character, but within a specific social context. Which is kind of a political thing, I admit that. But it's what I'm interested in, and it's how I believe human behavior is legible.

  Dana Spiotta

  Believe, Writing, Character

  Source: www.believermag.com

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• Co-mingling really disturbs a lot of the purists, who want to see the historical and cultural divides instead of the meshing.

  Laura Owens

  Want, Mingling, Divides

  Interview with Rachel Kushner, www.believermag.com. May 2003.

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• People can burn archives; people can destroy evidence, but to say that history is perishable, that historical evidence is perishable, is different than saying that history is subjective.

  Errol Morris

  People, Archives, Different

  Interview with Nick Poppy, www.believermag.com. April 2004.

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• If the Holocaust didn't take place, why then did this regime of occupation come about? Why do the European countries commit themselves to defending this regime? Permit me to make one more point. We are of the opinion that, if an historical occurrence conforms to the truth, this truth will be revealed all the more clearly if there is more research into it and more discussion about it.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

  Country, Holocaust, Research

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• If Holocaust happened, then those who bear the responsibility for it have to be punished, and not the Palestinians. Why isn't research into a deed that occurred 60 years ago permitted? After all, other historical occurrences, some of which lie several thousand years in the past, are open to research, and even the governments support this.

  Mahmoud Ahmadinejad

  Lying, Responsibility, Past

  "We Are Determined". Interview with Stefan Aust, Gerhard Sporl and Dieter Bednarz in Tehran, www.spiegel.de. May 30, 2006.

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• By nature, an auction is kind of a wholesale beast anyway. You're buying second hand goods, even with the historical, antique or aesthetic value. You look to get the wholesale price and you hope for retail spikes periodically when you get two or three people in the audience that want the same thing.

  Paul Brown

  Hands, Two, People

  Source: www.missbargainhuntress.com

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• This trial cannot be separated from the process of the historical struggle in Palestine that continues today between the Zionist Movement and the Palestinian people, a struggle that centers on Palestinian land, history, civilization, culture and identityAs for your judicial apparatus, which is where this court comes from: it is one of the instruments of the occupation whose function is to give the cover of legal legitimacy to the crimes of the occupation, in addition to consecrating its systems and allowing the imposition of these systems on our people through force.

  Ahmad Sa'adat

  Struggle, Land, Civilization

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• I always tell students that the first question to ask about any historical action is this: who makes money out of the deal?

  Carl R Trueman

  Firsts, Action, Students

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• Why did John Wilkes Booth do it? In My Thoughts Be Bloody young historian Nora Titone is one of the few to have genuinely explored this question. In doing so, she has crafted a fascinating psychological drama about one of the central events of the Civil War: the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. This book promises to stimulate lively historical debate, and will be a treat for every Civil War buff who always pondered that haunting question, “what made him pull that trigger?” Bravo on a marvelous achievement.

  Jay Winik

  Drama, War, Book

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• Before we can build a stable civilization worthy of humanity as a whole, it is necessary that each historical civilization should become conscious of its limitations and it's unworthiness to become the ideal civilization of the world.

  Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

  Civilization, Humanity, World

  Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1949). “Kalki: Or, The Future of Civilization”

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