#history

I'm trying to make a case for those people who don't have a sense of belonging that they should have, that there is something really worthwhile in having a sense of belonging, and recasting and looking at our modern history. ↗

— Billy Bragg

#case #having #history #i #looking

But Maastricht was not the end of history. It was a first step towards a Europe of growth, of employment, a social Europe. That was the vision of Francois Mitterrand. We are far from that now. ↗

— Laurent Fabius

#end #europe #far #first #first step

Better still - your history has shown how powerful a moral catharsis expressed through popular resistance to injustice can sometimes be; I have in mind the grassroots opposition to the Vietnam War. ↗

— Breyten Breytenbach

#catharsis #expressed #grassroots #history #how

The common people have no history: persecuted by the present, they cannot think of preserving the memory of the past. ↗

— Jean Henri Fabre

#common #common people #history #memory #past

Suppose that a man leaps out of a burning building—as my dear friend and colleague Jeff Goldberg sat and said to my face over a table at La Tomate in Washington not two years ago—and lands on a bystander in the street below. Now, make the burning building be Europe, and the luckless man underneath be the Palestinian Arabs. Is this a historical injustice? Has the man below been made a victim, with infinite cause of complaint and indefinite justification for violent retaliation? My own reply would be a provisional 'no,' but only on these conditions. The man leaping from the burning building must still make such restitution as he can to the man who broke his fall, and must not pretend that he never even landed on him. And he must base his case on the singularity and uniqueness of the original leap. It can't, in other words, be 'leap, leap, leap' for four generations and more. The people underneath cannot be expected to tolerate leaping on this scale and of this duration, if you catch my drift. In Palestine, tread softly, for you tread on their dreams. And do not tell the Palestinians that they were never fallen upon and bruised in the first place. Do not shame yourself with the cheap lie that they were told by their leaders to run away. Also, stop saying that nobody knew how to cultivate oranges in Jaffa until the Jews showed them how. 'Making the desert bloom'—one of Yvonne's stock phrases—makes desert dwellers out of people who were the agricultural superiors of the Crusaders. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#analogies #arabs #colonialism #crusades #europe

Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend. ↗

— Margaret Thatcher

#democratic #depend #find #must #nations

We are the offspring of history, and must establish our own paths in this most diverse and interesting of conceivable universes—one indifferent to our suffering, and therefore offering us maximum freedom to thrive, or to fail, in our own chosen way. ↗

— Stephen Jay Gould

#diversity #freedom #history #liberty #suffering

Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country. ↗

— Jackson Browne

#around #began #college #college students #contained

And when you started looking into Roger East, it was almost like he had disappeared from history. ↗

— Anthony LaPaglia

#disappeared #east #had #history #into

I like storytelling movies and more than that I like historical movies; and I think someday I'll definitely make a movie about the past 50 years history. ↗

— Asghar Farhadi

#definitely #historical #history #i #i think