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Connexions Quotations
History
Quotes
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Time is an enormous, long river, and I’m standing in it, just as you’re standing in it. My elders are the tributaries, and everything they thought and every struggle they went through and everything they gave their lives to, and every song they created, and every poem that they laid down flows down to me – and if I take the time to ask, and if I take the time to see, and if I take the time to reach out, I can build that bridge between my world and theirs. I can reach down into that river and take out what I need to get through this world.
- Utah Phillips
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As for the future, most of those who talk and write about it do so as if it already existed
and as if we were being inexorably carried toward it, like passengers on a train moving toward
a place they had not seen and could only wonder about. This is of course not true.
The future does not exist. It has not been made. It is made only as we make it.
The question we should be asking ourselves is what sort of future do we want?
- John Holt
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The battle over history is never really about the past – it’s about the future.
- Seamus Milne
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Each life will never come again, and a whole range of knowledge passes with each person.
- Michael Riordon
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Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice.
He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
- Karl Marx
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History does nothing, it “possesses no immense wealth”,
it “wages no battles”. It is human beings, real, living human beings who do all that,
who possess and fight; “history” is not, as it were, a person apart, using human beings as a means to achieve its own aims; history is nothing but the activity of human beings pursuing their aims.
- Karl Marx
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History is important. If you don’t know history it is as if you were born yesterday. And if you were born yesterday, anybody up there in a position of power can tell you anything, and you have no way of checking up on it.
- Howard Zinn
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History is not the past. It is the stories we tell about the past. How we tell these stories - triumphantly or self-critically, metaphysically or dialectally – has a lot to do with whether we cut short or advance our evolution as human beings.
- Grace Lee Boggs
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How come you don’t work fourteen hours a day? Your great-great-grandparents did.
How come you only work the eight-hour day? Four guys got hanged fighting for the eight-hour day for you.
- Studs Terkel
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Human beings make their own history, but they do not make it as they please;
they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already,
given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an nightmare on the brains of the living.
- Karl Marx
Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
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I can understand pessimism, but I don’t believe in it. It’s not simply a matter of faith, but of historical evidence. Not overwhelming evidence, just enough to give hope, because for hope we don’t need certainty, only possibility.
- Howard Zinn
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I’m called an oral historian, which is something of a joke. Oral history was here long before the pen, long before Gutenberg and the printing press. The difference is I have a tape recorder in my hand.
- Studs Terkel
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Kids don’t have a little brother working in the coal mine,
they don’t have a little sister coughing her lungs out in the looms of the big mill towns of the Northeast.
Why? Because we organized; we broke the back of the sweatshops in this country; we have child labor laws.
Those were not benevolent gifts from enlightened management. They were fought for, they were bled for,
they were died for by working people, by people like us. Kids ought to know that. That’s why I sing these songs.
That’s why I tell these stories, dammit. No root, no fruit!
- Utah Phillips
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“The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.”
- George Orwell
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One of the problems with our society is that we believe everything has to be new and different. I don’t apologize for having ideas that are ‘old’. Some of the ideas I’m fondest of aren’t just 25 or 100 years old, they’re 2,000 years old or even older.
- Ulli Diemer
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The only lesson of history is that nothing is ever learned from it.
- A.J.P. Taylor
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There is history that remembers and history that arises from a need to forget.
- Christopher Lasch
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We can’t select our ancestors, but they, often in ways never to be guessed, can select pieces of
our future.
- William Least Heat-Moon
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We don’t know if we’ll win: history is made by human beings, and where human beings are concerned, nothing is inevitable. But because people do make history, we know that it is possible to build a new world, and we strive to realize that possibility.
- Ulli Diemer
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We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.
- R.D. Laing.
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To learn more about History, explore the Connexions Subject Index History page and the People’s History page.
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