History Quotes

I believe that we have to look at our own history with humility and think about our responsibility.

Even if we didn’t know the context, we were instructed to remember that context existed. Everyone on earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.

It has had a calamitous effect on converted peoples. To be converted you have to destroy your past, destroy your history. You have to stamp on it, you have to say ‘my ancestral culture does not exist, it doesn’t matter’.

For the first time in the history of our country the majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years.

Punishment is not prevention. History offers cold comfort to those who think grievance and despair can be subdued by force.

As soon as histories are properly told there is no more need of romances.

Sometimes history takes things into its own hands.

Every age that has historical status is governed by aristocracies.

The instinct of revenge is the force which constitutes the essence of what we call psychology, history, metaphysics and morality. The spirit of revenge is the genealogical element of our thought, the transcendental principle of our way of thinking.

My heart has a history of silent catastrophes.