#history

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen. ↗

— Stephen Fry

#teaching #communication

The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion. Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender. ↗

— Howard Zinn

#history #hope #injustice #optimisim #spirit

What comes, is called. ↗

— Ki Longfellow

#hypatia-of-alexandria #mathematics #philosophy #spirituality #mathematics

Ari: The serial number was now my new name. I was dehumanized. I was branded like an animal, but was treated worse. This is what racism can do to people. ↗

— Christopher Huh

#racism #wwii-fiction #wwii-history #racism

The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else. ↗

— Frédéric Bastiat

#france #government #history #liberal #libertarian

For one who reads, there is no limit to the number of lives that may be lived, for fiction, biography, and history offer an inexhaustible number of lives in many parts of the world, in all periods of time. ↗

— Louis L'Amour

#fiction #history #inexhaustible #limit #lived

Beyond all sciences, philosophies, theologies, and histories, a child's relentless inquiry is truly all it takes to remind us that we don't know as much as we think we know. ↗

— Criss Jami

#certain #certainty #challenge #challenging #children

...as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold - everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment - an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by - I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, 'Can you see anything?' it was all I could do to get out the words, 'Yes, wonderful things. ↗

— Howard Carter

#archaeology #history #suspense

I am the Love that Dare not Speak its Name ↗

— Alfred B. Douglas

#history #homosexuality #love #male #suspense

Thenceforth they thought that, rationally concluded, doubt could become an instrument of knowledge. ↗

— Marc Bloch

#historiography #history #knowledge #nature