history

In the past, only some of the males, but all of the females, were able to procreate. Equality is more natural for females.

History isn't all fact--it's just the story the victors tell to keep themselves in power. And it's been a slow revision. The more time passes, the easier it becomes to reinvent the past.

Who knows what's for true once a time is past? There's no way to prove how something was that's gone. And if a time is gone, what does it matter? It's all rain into rivers now.

The present is the key to the past.

Living in the past, can only hold those who live there, as its prisoners.

What drew him back was something altogether more personal, to a history where, in the pain and longing of adolescence, he was still standing on the corner of Queen and Albert Streets waiting for someone that he knew would never appear. He had long understood that one of his selves, the earliest and most vulnerable, had never left this place, and this original and clearest view of things could be recovered only through what had first come to him in the glow of its ordinary light and weather...it was the light they appeared in that was the point, and that at least had not changed.

Permanence of instinct must go with permanence of form...The history of the present must teach us the history of the past.[Referring to studying fossil remains of the weevil, largely unchanged to the present day.]

Oh, glorious Art!" thus mused the enthusiastic painter, as he trod the street. "Thou art the image of the Creator's own. The innumerable forms that wander in nothingness start into being at thy beck. The dead live again. Thou recallest them to their old scenes, and givest their gray shadows the lustre of a better life, at once earthly and immortal. Thou snatchest back the fleeing moments of History. With thee, there is no Past; for at thy touch, all that is great becomes forever present; and illustrious men live through long ages in the visible performance of the very deeds which made them what they are.

My fascination with history is as much about the present as it is about the past.

knowing deep inside some ghosts are too cruel to question

Without archives many stories of real people would be lost, and along with those stories, vital clues that allow us to reflect and interpret our lives today.

They urge us to study our history that we might learn from past tragedies and errors. But sometimes I think it's actually a good thing that humanity so easily forgets. The haze that eventually claims old suffering often enables us to move on.

If history really forever repeats itself: then, it has always been then.

you don't need to go that far in the future, you just have to go 2000 years ago,

If there is any good in life, in history, in my own past, I invoke it now. I invoke it with all the passion with which I have lived.

The day we forget the horror, Sam, we will repeat it. Never forget your past. It will make you less human, less than human.

There was something so heavy about the burden of history, of the past.

History is about the past. Yet it exists only in the present _ the moment of its creation as history provides us with a narrative constructed after the events with which it is concerned. The narrative must then relate to the moment of its creation as much as its historical subject. History presents an historian with the task of producing a dialogue between the past and the present. But as these temporal co-ordinates cannot be fixed, history becomes a continuous interaction between the historian and the past. As such, history can be seen as a process of evaluation whereby the past is always coloured by the intellectual fashions and philosophical concerns of the present. This shifting perspective on the past is matched by the fluid status of the past itself.