historical burden Quotes

History is not the past. History is the present. We carry our history with us.

Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious.

America is therefore the land of the future, where, in the ages that lie before us, the burden of the World's History shall reveal itself.

[Russia] has been haunted by its relative backwardness, particularly in the military and industrial spheres.

History won't let go of us. We're pinned to it.

Remember the refrain: We always build on the past; the past always tries to stop us. Freedom is about stopping the past, but we have lost that ideal.

My likely historical significance is a terrible burden. ~ Calvin

If we are to move into the future, we must eradicate the past.

In a country like ours, burdened with a history of several centuries of religious wars, the struggle for freedom of liberal thought has often been bitter.

It's very important for cities all around the world to reinvent themselves, and Glasgow is a good example of that. The Scots are very nice. I don't think they are burdened by their history.

We French are colonized by the cruelest master of all. We are colonized by our past.

I began to feel that, in a sense, we were all prisoners of our own history.

If the past has been an obstacle and a burden, knowledge of the past is the safest and the surest emancipation.

Sometimes the past seems too big for the present to hold.

The writing of histories - as Goethe once noted - is one way of getting rid of the weight of the past.... The writing of history liberates us from history.

Remember this moment. If we don't convince the field marshal (Fedor von Bock) to fly to Hitler at once and have these orders (Commissar Order) canceled, the German people will be burdened with a guilt the world will not forget in a hundred years. This guilt will fall not only on Hitler, Himmler, Göring, and their comrades but on you and me, your wife and mine, your children and mine, that woman crossing the street, and those children over there playing ball.

...They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.

You can only adjust to so much history in your life. I still have trouble texting.

...on every sin which a colored man commits, the just white man must make a considerable discount, because of the colored man's antecedents. The heirs of slavery cannot with any sort of justice, be required to be as clear and straight and upright as the heirs of ancient freedom. And besides, whenever a colored man commits an unright action, upon his head is the guilt of only about one tenth of it, and upon your heads and mine and the rest of the white race lies fairly and justly the other nine tenths of the guilt.

This is naturally the most important thing, the dark traces left by the era of totalitarianism in the human mind, where is - are difficult to do away with. And this is a very demanding job.

I'm sick of making bloody history.

I dream of Poland becoming a modern society that is defined not by the crippling nature of history, but by our individual achievements, a sense of our own self-worth and ideas for the future.

Everyone carries the weight of WWII with them in their recent family history, and yet it is rarely spoken about within families, because veterans and survivors don't tend to talk.

The Middle Ages hangs over history's belt like a beer belly. It is too late now for aerobic dancing or cottage cheese lunches to reduce the Middle Ages. History will have to wear size 48 shorts forever.

Kings are the slaves of history.