#history

We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them. ↗

— Diane Ravitch

#history #education

Considerable thought was given in early Congresses to the possibility of renaming the country. From the start, many people recognized that United States of America was unsatisfactory. For one thing, it allowed of no convenient adjectival form. A citizen would have to be either a United Statesian or some other such clumsy locution, or an American, thereby arrogating to ourselves a title that belonged equally to the inhabitants of some three dozen other nations on two continents. Several alternatives to America were actively considered -Columbia, Appalachia, Alleghania, Freedonia or Fredonia (whose denizens would be called Freeds or Fredes)- but none mustered sufficient support to displace the existing name. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#humor #language #equality

...the holy men sat in an atmosphere reeking of antiquity, so thick with the dust of ages that you can't see through it --nor can they. ↗

— Gertrude Bell

#wisdom #age

You are not a victim. No matter what you have been through, you're still here. You may have been challenged, hurt, betrayed, beaten, and discouraged, but nothing has defeated you. You are still here! You have been delayed but not denied. You are not a victim, you are a victor. You have a history of victory. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#betrayed #challenged #defeated #denied #destiny

Just a little off the top!"- A. Boleyn ↗

— Robert Lynn Asprin

#humor #humor

We learn from history as much as a rabbit learns from an experiment that's performed upon it. ↗

— W.G. Sebald

#experience

The past is not another country; it is another life. The texture of daily living is different now than in the past, more different the further back we look, until we find people whose experiences created a psychology we might find baffling or rude. Many details that once made up the daily round are lost to us because people considered them too trivial to write down. Knowing the past means knowing what people carried in their pockets, what they did with their sewage, where their dogs slept. Those details may seem unimportant, but what they convey is not. ↗

— Scott Herring

#literature #experience

We know of no spectacle more ridiculous—or more contemptible—than that of the religious reactionaries who dare to re-write the history of our republic. Or who try to do so. Is it possible that, in their vanity and stupidity, they suppose that they can erase the name of Thomas Jefferson and replace it with the name of some faith-based mediocrity whose name is already obscure? If so, we cheerfully resolve to mock them, and to give them the lie in their teeth. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#history #thomas-jefferson #united-states #faith

Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man? ↗

— Howard Zinn

#equality #faith #government #history #equality

The history of American politics is littered with bodies of people who took so pure a position that they had no clout at all. ↗

— Benjamin C. Bradlee

#american politics #bodies #clout #had #history