#history

The long-established and noble rule of Law, one of the greatest products of the character and tradition of British history, has suffered a deadly blow. Blackmail has become respectable. ↗

— Robert Menzies

#blow #british #character #deadly #greatest

If you want to study the social and political history of modern nations, study hell. ↗

— Thomas Merton

#history #modern #nations #political #political history

As women, we're probably more protective of children. Also, we've been minors all of our history. ↗

— Kate Millett

#been #children #history #minors #more

What better way for a ruling class to claim and hold power than to pose as the defenders of the nation. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#conflict #government #history #politics #power

For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory. To forget would be not only dangerous but offensive; to forget the dead would be akin to killing them a second time. ↗

— Elie Wiesel

#history #philosophy #duty

History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation. ↗

— Julian Barnes

#memory

Calling sex by its name thereafter [the 17th c.] became more difficult and more costly. As if in order to gain mastery of it in reality, it had first been necessary to subjugate it at the level of language, control its free circulation in speech, expunge it from the things that were said, and extinguish the words that rendered it too visibly present. ↗

— Michel Foucault

#foucault #history #philosophy #sex #the-history-of-sexuality

And then Franklin smote the ground and up rose George Washington, fully dressed and astride a horse! Then the three of them, Franklin, Washington and the HORSE, proceeded to win the entire revolution single handley! ↗

— John Adams

#rewriting-history #revolution

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