Zola Budd Quotes

History can show you that it was one pile of bad stuff after another. It can also show you that there's been tremendous progress in knowledge, behaviour, laws, civilisation. It cannot show you that there was a meaning behind it.

The strides of humanity are slow, they can only be counted in centuries.

History never looks like history when you are living through it.

Most of us spend too much time on the last twenty-four hours and too little on the last six thousand years.

Each century believes its fight to be weightier than that of all others preceding it.

If you find great difficulty in trying to reckon with the future or even the present, I think it's intuitive to start that process by reckoning with the past.

There's power in turning to the past to illuminate the current state of things.

History's long arc is different than the today's headlines.

We now know how things were in the '60s and how things have changed, but I don't think we appreciate how much things have changed.

Hemingway seems to be in a funny position. People nowadays can't identify with him closely as a member of their own generation, and he isn't yet historical.

Man, it seems to me, is not in history: he is history.

Major social movements eventually fade into the landscape not because they have diminished but because they have become a permanent part of our perceptions and experience.

I study history in order to give an interpretation.

The problem of telling contemporary history is that your message gets outdated.

There certainly have been a lot of changes, although they come in such gradations that most people have either forgotten, or, if they're too young, they never knew about them in the first place.

Ere we can forecast the future we must understand the present and bring a just sense of proportion to our review of the history of the past.

Young man, I have lived in this house many years and have seen the occupants of the White House across the square come and go, and nothing you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long.

A few years in the age of nations is nothing.

I don't think you learn specific lessons from history, but you do learn proportion.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.

History is what we would make of it.

… the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity.

No people ever sees clearly those steps in its own progress, those events in its own life, which future generations will count glorious.

Literature is always about bygone times. It's always looking back in time with a certain perspective. I look at bygone life which no longer exists, and as I said, I look at it without nostalgia but without anger, either. I look at it with criticism and with compassion. I look at it with curiosity.

It's hard to understand a moment in history when you are in it.