#history

People in the West like to shoot things. When they first got to the West they shot buffalo. Once there were 70 million buffalo on the plains and then the people of the West started blasting away at them. Buffalo are just cows with big heads. If you've ever looked a cow in the face and seen the unutterable depths of trust and stupidity that lie within, you will be able to guess how difficult it must have been for people in the West to track down buffalo and shoot them to pieces. By 1895, there were only 800 buffalo left, mostly in zoos and touring Wild West shows. With no buffalo left to kill, Westerners started shooting Indians. Between 1850 and 1890 they reduced the number of Indians in America from two million to 90,000. Nowadays, thank goodness, both have made a recovery. Today there are 30,000 buffalo and 300,000 Indiands, and of course you are not allowed to shoot either, so all the Westerners have left to shoot at are road signs and each other, both of which they do rather a lot. There you have a capsule history of the West. ↗

— Bill Bryson

#buffalo #indians #the-west #wild-west #recovery

Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces. ↗

— Kate Morton

#memory #war #perspective

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors. ↗

— Max Lerner

#lessons #most #part #rationalizations #so-called

I lived in a region in the northwestern province - the people there in general have a great love for the Taliban, so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and the history of the movement. And my heart became attached to them. ↗

— John Walker Lindh

#became #general #great #great love #heart

I definitely felt that I was put at a very high place to be able to be a part of such a wonderful franchise in cinema history, so I was definitely very driven at doing a great job and having my body look the way it should and just being a part of the creative process. ↗

— Kristanna Loken

#being #body #cinema #creative #creative process

If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility. ↗

— Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

#disarm #each #enough #find #history

Cut quarrels out of literature, and you will have very little history or drama or fiction or epic poetry left. ↗

— Robert Staughton Lynd

#drama #epic #epic poetry #fiction #history

I shall cheerfully bear the reproach of having descended below the dignity of history if I can succeed in placing before the English of the nineteenth century a true picture of the life of their ancestors. ↗

— Thomas B. Macaulay

#bear #before #below #century #cheerfully

So the old Copenhagen interpretation needs to be generalized, needs to be replaced by something that can be used for the whole universe, and can be used also in cases where there is plenty of individuality and history. ↗

— Murray Gell-Mann

#cases #copenhagen #generalized #history #individuality

I want to write for history, not for the moment. ↗

— David Maraniss

#i #moment #want #write