#history

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

The worst mistake of first contact, made throughout history by individuals on both sides of every new encounter, has been the unfortunate habit of making assumptions. It often proved fatal. ↗

— David Brin

#been #both #both sides #contact #encounter

The history of my state of Oklahoma offers a great example of pursuing the American Dream. It was built and settled by pioneers moving West to seek better lives. ↗

— Mary Fallin

#american dream #better #built #dream #example

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

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929. ↗

— James Buchan

#bits #bulls #crash #dust #dutch

One of the consequences of the Iranian revolution has been an explosion of history. A country once known only from British consular reports and intrepid travelogues is now awash with historical documents, letters, diaries, grainy video, weblogs and secret police files of questionable authenticity. ↗

— James Buchan

#awash #been #british #consequences #consular

The year 2008 was a reminder to those who had forgotten that there is such a thing as history and that the cycle of famine and feast in commerce, first identified in antiquity and well understood in the Middle Ages, was not suddenly abolished in modern times. ↗

— James Buchan

#antiquity #commerce #cycle #famine #feast

There was a time in American history when almost every white person knew who Aretha Franklin was. ↗

— Peabo Bryson

#american #american history #aretha #aretha franklin #every