#story

In the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope. ↗

— Barack Obama

#history #hope #america

Remember, remember the Fifth of November, The Gunpowder Treason and Plot, I know of no reason Why the gunpowder treason Should ever be forgot. Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes, t’was his intent To blow up the King and Parli’ment. Three-score barrels of powder below To prove old England’s overthrow; By God’s providence he was catch’d With a dark lantern and burning match. Holloa boys, holloa boys, let the bells ring. Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King! ↗

— Alan Moore

#gunpowder #king #november #treason #english

If I had been an Italian I am sure that I should have been whole-heartedly with you from the start to finish in your triumphant struggle against the bestial appetites and passions of Leninism." (Speech in Rome on 20 January, 1927, praising Mussolini) ↗

— Winston Churchill

#fascism #history #italy #lenin #politics

There is no doubt fiction makes a better job of the truth. ↗

— Doris Lessing

#on-fiction #storytelling #truth #truth-telling #job

The problem is not the content of textbooks, but the very idea of them. ↗

— Sam Wineburg

#history #education

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's no way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#story #unhappiness #conflict

How fortunate it was for the world that when these great trials came upon it there was a generation that terror could not conquer and brutal violence could not enslave. ↗

— Winston Churchill

#terrorism

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

God is the story nature tells to those who are listening. ↗

— Steve Maraboli

#listen #nature #story #experience

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