Roxane Gay Quotes

Selective memory has always been the problem. An insistence on seeing some people and movements as the sum only of their brightest and most glorious moments, and others as unmitigated villains, makes for a vision of history that is tragically incomplete.

I always try to find something I like about the bad guys and then try to find the mistakes and the flaws in the good guys.

There's a certain edge about cruelty. If you're honest about it, most people wince, but say it had to be said.

I think heroes who are not flawed are not believable.

There's nothing wrong with celebrating the good things in our past. But memories, like witnesses, do not always tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. We need to cross-examine them, recognizing and accepting the inconsistencies and gaps in those that make us proud and happy as well as those that cause us pain.

History is so subjective. The teller of it determines it.

I wanted to re-examine stories people think they know without the rose-colored glasses of Hollywood and let the audience decide for themselves if people like Wyatt Earp were sinners or victims of life circumstances.

I think people are screw-ups, and even our greatest heroes are deeply flawed human beings. People make bad decisions for all the wrong reasons, and then somehow they'll do the right thing, and then somehow they'll save somebody, or they'll be compassionate. Horrible people can do wonderful things, and wonderful people can do horrible things.

It's very hard to play a man without any flaws.

Kissinger's unusually high body count and singular moral imperiousness has the effect, among his critics, of obscuring his didactic utility. An outsized personality who has committed outsized mayhem, Kissinger eclipses his own context. Yet, as animals were to the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, Kissinger is good to think with.

History, at its best, always tells us as much indirectly about ourselves as it does directly about our predecessors, and it is often most revealing when it deals with episodes and phenomena that we find repulsive.

So much for the myth that motherhood is all Laura Ashley smocks and skipping through fields. People think it's rose-tinted and they don't tell the truth!

I just tell the truth. Some people don't like it. Some people do.

I grew up thinking that it was immoral to idealize the past because, in the past, there was slavery and no penicillin.

I'm constantly not on the right side of history. I sympathize with the soldiers in the enemy's camp. For example in WWII, we know the Nazis and the Japanese were wrong. But I sympathize with the individual story of a soldier who was drafted into that.

Contemporary defenders of the Enlightenment shouldn't overgeneralize: the Enlightenment, however it is defined, is not an unalloyed good.

The truth hurts. It hurts to some people.

The Great War was nobody's fault - or everybody's.

The difference between eccentricity and originality in historical studies is often difficult to detect at first encounter. When a radically new interpretation of a large segment of history makes its appearance, time is needed to sift the evidence.

Can we ever understand the past, or do we just endlessly rework it to suit us in the present?

I know the difference between right and wrong, and I can tell good from bad. But I also know that the more difficult decisions come when we have to choose between good and better. The toughest calls of all are those we have to make between bad and worse.

History must always be taken with a grain of salt. It is, after all, not a science but an art.

Humanity is not perfect in any fashion; no more in the case of evil than in that of good. The criminal has his virtues, just as the honest man has his weaknesses.

No greater mistake can be made than to imagine that what has been written latest is always the more correct; that what is written later on is an improvement on what was written previously; and that every change means progress.

History justifies whatever we want it to. It teaches absolutely nothing, for it contains everything and gives examples of everything.