98 Inspiring Historical Quotes

In our journey through history, the power of words has consistently shaped societies, stirred revolutions, and inspired generations. The wisdom of the past often echoes in the present, offering guidance, motivation, and a deep sense of connection to the human experience. Whether uttered by leaders in times of crisis or penned by thinkers contemplating the human condition, historical quotes capture the essence of pivotal moments and timeless truths. Dive into this curated collection of 98 inspiring historical quotes, each a testament to the enduring influence of eloquence and conviction. Let these words of wisdom empower you as they have countless others throughout the ages.

1. “That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that history has to teach.” - Aldous Huxley

2. “All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place.” - Edward Said

3. “Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.” - George Macaulay Trevelyan

4. “Communism is the riddle of history solved, and it knows itself to be this solution.” - Karl Marx

5. “History is written by the winners.” - Napoleon Bonaparte

6. “The raconteur knows too well that, if he investigates the truth of the matter, he is only too likely to lose his good story.” - Herbert Butterfield

7. “Herodotus says, "Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest do not happen at all: the conscientious historian will correct these defects.” - Mark Twain

8. “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

9. “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” - L.P. Hartley

10. “The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see.” - Winston S. Churchill

11. “The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else.” - Frederic Bastiat

12. “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

13. “History is a vast early warning system.” - Norman Cousins

14. “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” - Carl Sagan

15. “The history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sown thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal.” - Mark Twain

16. “Too much faith is the worst ally. When you believe in something literally, through your faith you'll turn it into something absurd. One who is a genuine adherent, if you like, of some political outlook, never takes its sophistries seriously, but only its practical aims, which are concealed beneath these sophistries. Political rhetoric and sophistries do not exist, after all, in order that they be believed; rather, they have to serve as a common and agreed upon alibi. Foolish people who take them in earnest sooner or later discover inconsistencies in them, begin to protest, and finish finally and infamously as heretics and apostates. No, too much faith never brings anything good...” - Milan Kundera

17. “Let us study things that are no more. It is necessary to understand them, if only to avoid them.” - Victor Hugo

18. “He tans into burning while the opening fanfare to "Peaches en Regalia" flows over him, the bugle call for a hippie army that marched at the peak of the American parabola, that moment when physics held its breath to allow levitation, a small reward before the descent. The hippies knew it then, Maggot Boy Johnson thinks; they couldn't build it into words but they could feel it; a floating in the stomach as history shifted direction. They stopped, hey, what's that sound, and knew that the spiny skyscrapers reflected in the river, the chasms of concrete, the wide streets and sidewalks, the power lines cutting into the hills and mountains above missile silos, the highways drawing lines across the blank plains under enormous skies, the pupil of God's eye, would be the ruins that their grandchildren wandered among, the reminders that once there was always water in the faucet, there was electricity all the time, and America was prying off the shackles of its past. The vision opened up to them and winked out again, and those it blinded staggered through their lives unable to see anything else, while the rest of them wondered if they had only dreamed it.” - Brian Francis Slattery

19. “Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it.” - Oscar Wilde

20. “Let that be a reminder to you that the past is one thing, but what we make of it, the conclusions we draw, is another. History can be many things, depending on how we read it, just as the future can be many things, depending on how we live it. There is no inevitability to any historical occurrence, only what people will allow to take place. And it is by dreaming first that we get to new realities.” - Yann Martel

21. “Clio, the muse of history, is as thoroughly infected with lies as a street whore with syphilis.” - Schopenhauer

22. “Faithfulness to the truth of history involves far more than research, however patient and scrupulous, into special facts. The narrator must seek to imbue himself with the life and spirit of the time.” - Francis Parkman

23. “The anarch knows the rules. He has studied them as a historian and goes along with them as a contemporary. Wherever possible, he plays his own game within their framework; this makes the fewest waves.” - Ernst Jünger

24. “The past could be jettisoned . . . but seeds got carried.” - Joan Didion

25. “In olden days people were worse than us but knew much more than us.” - Vladimir Odoevsky

26. “People have an annoying habit of remembering things they shouldn't.” - Christopher Paolini

27. “Their lives were precarious and they knew it. They were trying their best to fit themselves into a country which would never quite accept them, and to make themselves acceptable in a part of the world where their intrusion was resented in the vain hope that thus their establishments might endure ... The Orient remained strange and hostile. Unfamiliar diseases abounded. No one could be trusted. There was never security or peace for long. In any alley-way an assassin might be lurking, sent down from the Old Man of the Mountain. At any moment the lord might have to rise from his couch to ride out against enemy raiders. At any moment his lady might find herself in charge of the defence of her castle. At any moment the festivities might be interrupted by the sound of the infidel mangonels pounding against the walls. Life was merry, but it was short; and when the crisis came there was no lack of gallantry among the lords and ladies of Outremer. They had tasted with relish the gracious things of life; and they faced their doom with pride and resolution.” - Steven Runciman

28. “When the British left, India was a multireligious, multiregional, multiethnic country, exploited, backward, and poor from colonialism.” - Prem Kishore

29. “History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?” - Dan Brown

30. “Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor.” - Robert A. Heinlein

31. “And that, ...is the story of our country, one invasion after another...Macedonians. Saddanians. Arabs. Mongols. Now the Soviets. But we're like those walls up there. Battered, and nothing pretty to look at, but still standing.” - Khaled Hosseini

32. “The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed... Like thief in the night, aliens invade human. Chaos happens prior to the new order of coexistence. The truth is sealed. Life goes on. Till one day, history changed.” - Toba Beta

33. “The lies (Western slander) which well-meaning zeal has heaped round this man (Muhammad) are disgraceful to ourselves only.” - Thomas Carlyle

34. “By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account.” - Dan Brown

35. “Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.” - Isaac Bashevis Singer

36. “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. ” - Foucault Michel

37. “Anything the Austrians could do, the Prussians could do better.” - Tim Blanning

38. “He lied all the time even when there was no need to lie [...] He needed a _history_, a sense of self. [Burnside on his father, p. 22]” - John Burnside

39. “The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity's most powerful and a senseless desire - the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?” - Hermann Hesse

40. “Reality denied comes back to haunt.” - Philip K. Dick

41. “Call no man happy until he is dead.” - Solon

42. “You have to know the past to understand the present.” - Carl Sagan

43. “Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.” - Hannah Arendt

44. “Darnley, who, like Banquo's ghost, seemed to play a much more effective part in Scottish politics once he was dead than when he was alive.” - Antonia Fraser

45. “History isn't like that. History unravels gently, like an old sweater. It has been patched and darned many times, reknitted to suit different people, shoved in a box under the sink of censorship to be cut up for the dusters of propaganda, yet it always - eventually - manages to spring back into its old familar shape. History has a habit of changing the people who think they are changing it. History always has a few tricks up its frayed sleeve. It's been around a long time.” - Terry Pratchett

46. “Happy is the people that is without history. And thrice is the people without sociology.” - Christopher Henry Dawson

47. “Aku kira dan bagiku itulah kesadaran sejarah. Sadar akan hidup dan kesia-siaan nilai.” - Soe Hok Gie

48. “You must train harder than the enemy who is trying to kill you. You will get all the rest you need in the grave.” - Leon Degrelle

49. “And shall we at last become the victims of our own abominable lust of gain? Forbid it, Heaven." Washington himself could be a hard driving businessman, yet he found the rapacity of many vendors unconscionable. As he told George Mason, he thought it the intent of the speculators, various tribes of money makers and stock jobbers of all denominations, to continue the war for their own private emolument, without considering that their avarice and thirst for gain must plunge everything in one common ruin.” - Ron Chernow

50. “Washington once advised his adopted grandson that where there is no occasion for expressing an opinion, it is best to be silent. For there is nothing more certain than that it is at all times more easy to make enemies than friends.” - Ron Chernow

51. “A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe.” - Henry Kissinger

52. “The stream of Time, irresistible, ever moving, carries off and bears away all things that come to birth and plunges them into utter darkness, both deeds of no account and deeds which are mighty and worthy of commemoration; as the playwright [Sophocles] says, it 'brings to light that which was unseen and shrouds from us that which was manifest.' Nevertheless, the science of History is a great bulwark against this stream of Time; in a way it checks this irresistible flood, it holds in a tight grasp whatever it can seize floating on the surface and will not allow it to slip away into the depths of Oblivion....I, having realized the effects wrought by Time, desire now by means of my writings to give an account of my father's deeds, which do not deserve to be consigned to Forgetfulness nor to be swept away on the flood of Time into an ocean of Non-Remembrance; I wish to recall everything....” - Anna Comnena

53. “Tesla,” the vicar mused. “That’s a foreign name, is it not? Hungarian,is it?”“Serbian,” I corrected him. “I’m afraid the ——shire Teslas are ascant three centuries in these parts, having constructed Tesla Hall inthe reign of Queen Elizabeth.We are a restless people, and no doubtwill be moving on again any century now.” - Vinnie Tesla

54. “It turns out to be the new Planet, which, a decade and a half later, will be known first as the Georgian, and then as Herschel, after its official Discoverer, and more lately as Uranus.” - Thomas Pynchon

55. “On the journey towards the beloved, you live by dying at every step.” - Nadeem Aslam

56. “Whatever happened in those more than one hundred years, from the time my great-great-great grandfather studied law to the time when my own father took his bar exam in 1989, I may never know. Perhaps it was just greed and the good, old-fashion corruption that comes with power. The Drexlers have moved from the fight for human rights to the fight for corporations and wealthy individuals. We file their taxes, write their contracts, clean up their messes. As I see it, we have become little more than glorified Public Relations reps” - Gwenn Wright

57. “Letting go means to come to the realization that some people are a part of your history, but not a part of your destiny.” - Steve Maraboli

58. “The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.” - Aberjhani

59. “When white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our “fault.” But it is undeniably our inheritance.” - Douglas A. Blackmon

60. “That is the way we decided to talk, free and easy, two young men discussing a boxing match. That was the only way to talk. You couldn't let too much truth seep into your conversation, you couldn't admit with your mouth what your eyes had seen. If you opened the door even a centimeter, you would smell the rot outside and hear the screams. You did not open the door. You kept your mind on the tasks of the day, the hunt for food and water and something to burn, and you saved the rest for the end of the war.” - david benioff

61. “It was a fact generally acknowledged by all but the most contumacious spirits at the beginning of the seventeenth century that woman was the weaker vessel; weaker than man, that is. ... That was the way God had arranged Creation, sanctified in the words of the Apostle. ... Under the common law of England at the accession of King James I, no female had any rights at all (if some were allowed by custom). As an unmarried woman her rights were swallowed up in her father's, and she was his to dispose of in marriage at will. Once she was married her property became absolutely that of her husband. What of those who did not marry? Common law met that problem blandly by not recognizing it. In the words of The Lawes Resolutions [the leading 17th century compendium on women's legal status]: 'All of them are understood either married or to be married.' In 1603 England, in short, still lived in a world governed by feudal law, where a wife passed from the guardianship of her father to her husband; her husband also stood in relation to her as a feudal lord.” - Antonia Fraser

62. “DNA has memory!” - Isaiah Washington

63. “История — не пропахший табаком да лавандой бабушкин сундук, а деловой портфель с документами, которые всегда следует держать под рукой, потому что они могут вдруг оказаться востребованными.” - Boris Vasiliev

64. “We live in a moment of history where change is so speeded up that we begin to see the present only when it is already disappearing.” - R.D. Laing

65. “The riders, clad in crimson and black, stopped to scan the maze. Blaise shrank into the hedge, but one keen-eyed hunter spied him. He raised his crossbow, took careful aim and fired.” - Teresa Flavin

66. “Adolf Hitler is probably the last of the great adventurer-conquerors in the tradition of Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon, and the Third Reich the last of the empires which set out on the path taken earlier by France, Rome and Macedonia. The curtain was rung down on that phase of history, at least, by the sudden invention of the hydrogen bomb, of the ballistic missile and of rockets that can be aimed to hit the moon.” - William L. Shirer

67. “Rough palms cradled my face while my fingers gripped the pillow on either side of his. Lips, teeth, tongue, mingled together. I ate him up and didn’t let go until I had to come up for air.” - Priya Ardis

68. “The two main criminals are France and the United States. They owe Haiti enormous reparations because of actions going back hundreds of years. If we could ever get to the stage where somebody could say, 'We're sorry we did it,' that would be nice. But if that just assuages guilt, it's just another crime. To become minimally civilized, we would have to say, 'We carried out and benefited from vicious crimes. A large part of the wealth of France comes from the crimes we committed against Haiti, and the United States gained as well. Therefore we are going to pay reparations to the Haitian people.' Then you will see the beginnings of civilization.” - Noam Chomsky

69. “My faceless neighbor spoke up:“Don’t be deluded. Hitler has made it clear that he will annihilate all Jews before the clock strikes twelve.”I exploded:“What do you care what he said? Would you want us to consider him a prophet?His cold eyes stared at me. At last he said, wearily:“I have more faith in Hitler than in anyone else. He alone has kept his promises, all his promises, to the Jewish people.” - Elie Wiesel

70. “Historical Re-creation, he thought glumly, as they picked their way across, under, over or through the boulders and insect-buzzing heaps of splintered timber, with streamlets running everywhere. Only we do it with people dressing up and running around with blunt weapons, and people selling hot dogs, and the girls all miserable because they can only dress up as wenches, wenching being the only job available to women in the olden days.” - Terry Pratchett

71. “He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.” - George Eliot

72. “[R]eligion was the race's first (and worst) attempt to make sense of reality. It was the best the species could do at a time when we had no concept of physics, chemistry, biology or medicine. We did not know that we lived on a round planet, let alone that the said planet was in orbit in a minor and obscure solar system, which was also on the edge of an unimaginably vast cosmos that was exploding away from its original source of energy. We did not know that micro-organisms were so powerful and lived in our digestive systems in order to enable us to live, as well as mounting lethal attacks on us as parasites. We did not know of our close kinship with other animals. We believed that sprites, imps, demons, and djinns were hovering in the air about us. We imagined that thunder and lightning were portentous. It has taken us a long time to shrug off this heavy coat of ignorance and fear, and every time we do there are self-interested forces who want to compel us to put it back on again.” - Christopher Hitchens

73. “Suddenly all those individuals who yesterday felt that "we" meant only their families, their professions, or perhaps their communities, become men of the nation. Their emotions and thoughts, their egos, that "something" within them, all are transformed: they have become historical.” - Oswald Spengler

74. “Wir lernen aus unserer eigenen Geschichte, wozu der Mensch fähig ist. Deshalb dürfen wir uns nicht einbilden, wir seien nun als Menschen anders und besser geworden. Es gibt keine endgültig errungene moralische Vollkommenheit - für niemanden und kein Land! Wir haben als Menschen gelernt, wir bleiben als Menschen gefährdet. Aber wir haben die Kraft, Gefährdungen immer von neuem zu überwinden."[Ansprache am 8. Mai 1985 in der Gedenkstunde im Plenarsaal des Deutschen Bundestages]” - Richard von Weizsäcker

75. “Each generation ... rescues a new area from what its predecessors arrogantly and snobbishly dismissed as 'the lunatic fringe.” - Christopher Hill

76. “History remembers only the names of the conquerors. There are no pages devoted to the scruples of the losers.” - Manjul Bajaj

77. “I noticed him right away. No, it wasn’t his lean, rugged face. Or the dark waves of shiny hair that hung just a little too long on his forehead. It wasn’t the slim, collarless biker jacket he wore, hugging his lean shoulders. It was the way he stood. The confident way he waited in the cafeteria line to get a slice of pizza. He didn’t saunter. He didn’t amble. He stood at the center, and let the other people buzz around him. His stance was straight and sure.” - Priya Ardis

78. “...As the evening wore on (the supper did not end until seven in the morning), the public were admitted to watch the festivities from the balustrade, and were offered biscuits and refreshments to keep them going through the night....One of the lawyers was so upset by the evening that he got up to leave, proclaiming: 'They will send you to the madhouse and strike you from the list of members of the Bar.' Grimod responded by locking the doors to the apartment and preventing any further guests from leaving. Coffee and liquers were taken in an adjoining room lit by 130 candles while the guests were entertained by a magic-lantern show and some experiments with electricity performed by the Italian physicist Castanio. M Rival tells us that many of the guests fell asleep.” - Giles MacDonogh

79. “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.” - Jo Dereske

80. “She turned her painted blue eyes toward the assistant and said something in French before she left.” - Nancy B. Brewer

81. “It was now December 7, 1941; the date that Franklin D. Roosevelt was destined to declare would live in infamy.” - Randall Wallace

82. “Science has marched forward. But civilization’s values remain rooted in philosophies, religious traditions, and ethical frameworks devised many centuries ago. Even our economic system, capitalism, is half a millennium old. The first stock exchange opened in 1602 in Amsterdam. By 1637, tulip mania had caused the first speculation bubble and crash. And not a lot has changed. Virtually every business stills uses the double-entry bookkeeping and accounting adopted in thirteenth –century Venice. So our daily dealings are still heavily influenced by ideas that were firmly set before anyone knew the world was round. In many ways, they reflect how we understood the world when we didn’t understand the world at all.” - Carl Safina

83. “بل وصل الحال فى عهد معاوية أن دخل عليه أحدهم وهو فى مجلس الخلافة فحياه قائلا : السلام عليك أيها الأجير.وعندما اعترض عليه نفر من الجالسين أصر على مقولته متسائلا: ألم يستأجرك الله لرعاية هذه الأمه؟.وهو ذاته الذى هب فى وجه معاوية عندما حبس بعض الهبات المالية عن المسلمين وقال له أمام الجميع: كيف تمنع العطاء وأنه ليس من كدك ولا من كد أبيك ولا من كد أمك؟!” - فهمي هويدي

84. “Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from their original owner, Montezuma); a little heap of orange peels left on the table by the late Robespierre; John Brown's lengthily underlined letters; Lenin's bottles of invisible ink; one of Di Giovanni's suitcases, with an iron cylinder of gelignite and two glass tubes of acid inside; the Constitution of the Ku Klux Klan; a bruised ear (Napoleon pinched it with loving condescension)... And dead bodies, of course. (They sing about John Brown's body.) Memoirs, manifestoes, civil codes, trial proceedings, photographs, statues, weapons now aestheticized by that selfsame history - the sword of Frederick the Great, and God knows what else. Then dust blows out of fresh graves, and the orange peels go grey, sink, wither, rot away. Sooner or later, every murder becomes quaint. Charlemagne hanged four and a half thousand "rebels" in a single day, but he has achieved a storybook benevolence. And that's only natural: historiography begins after the orange has been sucked,; the peeler believes in the "great and beautiful things," or wants to believe; easy for us to believe likewise, since dust reduced truth and counterfeit to the same greyness - caveat emptor. But ends remain fresh, and means remain inexplicable. Rising up and rising down! And whom shall I save, and who is my enemy, and who is my neighbor?” - William T. Vollmann

85. “La fedeltà al passato non è un dato bensì un voto. Come tutti i voti può essere deluso, o tradito” - Paul Ricoeur

86. “I began with the desire to speak with the dead.” - Stephen Greenblatt

87. “Not that anybody cares two pins about history in these days.We've got rid of history; history is all my eye. But I've got to tell you the facts.” - Carter Dickson

88. “History has never been fair to the Armenians and it is too late to start being so now” - Colin McEvedy

89. “The silencing of the Haitian Revolution is only a chapter within a narrative of global domination. It is part of the history of the West and it is likely to persist, even in attenuated form, as long as the history of the West is not retold in ways that bring forward the perspective of the world.” - Michel-Rolph Trouillot

90. “France is to me the heroine in the romance of all the nations of all time. This feeling was born in me years ago when I read how her noble sons had defended America in its cradle. Today I am proud that I am one of the millions who will come to save our heroine from the clutches of the villain from across the Rhine.” - William Arthur Sirmon

91. “...the art of Europe is drowned in the centuries in the war-scarred face of a motherland..” - John Geddes

92. “examination of its own history and of the forms of thought given the name “philosophy” indicates that “philosophy” has itself borne many fundamentally different meanings through the years, and from one school or movement to another.” - Gregory B. Sadler

93. “English kings married their cousins and so their kids were as sharp as clubs.” - Peter Prasad

94. “Siapa gerangan yang menciptakan diorama? Apakah sejak semula itu dibuat untuk alat informasi, pendidikan, propaganda, atau hiburan? Atau semuanya sekaligus? Apakah penciptanya kelak tahu bahwa diorama bisa digunakan secara efektif sebagai dongeng bagi anak-anak sekolah, tentang bagaimana negeri ini terbentuk menjadi sebuah negeri penuh luka dan paranoia?” - Leila S. Chudori

95. “Bernard was to remember this moment for the rest of his life. As they drank from their water bottles he was struck by the recently concluded war not as a historical, geopolitical fact but as a multiplicity, a near-infinity of private sorrows, as a boundless grief minutely subdivided without diminishment among individuals who covered the continent like dust, like spores whose separate identities would remain unknown, and whose totality showed more sadness than anyone could ever begin to comprehend; a weight borne in silence by hundreds of thousands, millions, like the woman in black for a husband and two brothers, each grief a particular, intricate, keening love story that might have been otherwise. It seemed as though he had never thought about the war before, not about its cost. He had been so busy with the details of his work, of doing it well, and his widest view had been of war aims, of winning, of statistical deaths, statistical destruction, and of post-war reconstruction. For the first time he sensed the scale of the catastrophe in terms of feeling; all those unique and solitary deaths, all that consequent sorrow, unique and solitary too, which had no place in conferences, headlines, history, and which had quietly retired to houses, kitchens, unshared beds, and anguished memories. This came upon Bernard by a pine tree in the Languedoc in 1946 not as an observation he could share with June but as a deep apprehension, a recognition of a truth that dismayed him into silence and, later, a question: what possible good could come of a Europe covered in this dust, these spores, when forgetting would be inhuman and dangerous, and remembering a constant torture?” - Ian McEwan

96. “Colonialism hardly ever exploits the whole of a country. It contents itself with bringing to light the natural resources, which it extracts, and exports to meet the needs of the mother country's industries, thereby allowing certain sectors of the colony to become relatively rich. But the rest of the colony follows its path of under-development and poverty, or at all events sinks into it more deeply.” - Frantz Fanon

97. “It’s important to honor your ancestors. Bringing in a piece of furniture or an object you’ve inherited from a loved one not only honors the person who has passed but also brings the warmth of happy memories into your home.” - Jeffrey A. Wands

98. “Somehow the past is a safe place to explore our collective cultural neuroses.” - Tom Hiddleston