Ta-Nehisi Coates Quotes

I stated that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are 'among the most unspeakable crimes in history.' I took no position on just where they stand on the scale of horrors relative to Auschwitz, the bombing of Chungking, Lidice, and so on.

Norway as a nation should take collective responsibility for what happened in our country during World War II. I see it as our duty to seek a broad, moral reconciliation and to let this be expressed economically.

I am not a German bitter-ender. I am, though, a German never-forgetter.

It took Austria a long time to be honest about its past.

Germany's historical responsibility will not expire. We want to live up to it - and you should judge us on it.

Our prime minister could embrace and forgive the people who killed our beloved sons and fathers, and so he should, but he could not, would not, apologise to the Aboriginal people for 200 years of murder and abuse. The battle against the Turks, he said in Gallipoli, was our history, our tradition. The war against the Aboriginals, he had already said at home, had happened long ago. The battle had made us; the war that won the continent was best forgotten

If we are to put the past on trial, where do we stop?

There are, after all, between seventy-five thousand and a hundred thousand descendants of the Ball-family slaves. If I were to begin apologizing to every one of these families, it would quickly become a meaningless act.

I think if 'The Narrow Road To The Deep North' is one of the high points of Japanese culture, then the experience of my father, who was a slave laborer on the Death Railway, represents one of its low points.

But Germany will always suffer, I fear, from the intensely dramatic character of the crimes of the Third Reich.

Poland is a wildly dramatic and tragic story. It's just unbelievable what went on with those people. How they survive, I don't really know. The Germans had a particular hatred for the Poles; they really considered them subhuman Slavs, and they were very brutal to them.

When, at the end of the 1960s, I became interested in the Nazi era, it was a taboo subject in Germany. No one spoke about it anymore, no more in my house than anywhere else.

I feel like the people from Iceland have a different relationship with their country than other places. Most Icelandic people are really proud to be from there, and we don't have embarrassments like World War II where we were cruel to other people.

When you grew up in France in the 1970s and 80s, the Vel' d'Hiv wasn't part of the history program.

It's not right to think about all of Jewish-German history as shrouded by the smoke of the crematorium.

To walk through the ruined cities of Germany is to feel an actual doubt about the continuity of civilization.

The South is the only part of the country that has been defeated; the rest of the country, unlike most people in the world have never been conquered. But the Southerners have …. The South is the soul of America.

A lot of people may not read the history of their own country, but they carry on memories transmitted by previous generations. They're trying to achieve something, [they] have their mission and anger -- all this is fed by past experience of history.

A thousand years will pass and still this guilt of Germany will not have been erased.

Our Civil War was a blot on our history, but not as great a blot as the buying and selling of Negro souls.

We are watching the Germans closely; we are not forgetting what they did to us during the war.

If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.

Many Germans dream of revenge today.

In German history, we don't have many reasons to be proud.

The Holocaust of Nazi Germany is certainly no less of a historic crime than the Holocaust that went on for centuries against African-Americans. That process of reparations, and a truth and reconciliation discussion, was extremely helpful in the country of Germany, and we need to have that here.