Aldis Hodge Quotes

I think that America has an obsession with history, really.

For a country is not merely a piece of earth; it is, above all, a compendium of social, cultural, and historical factors which begin to acquire sense and order through the process of writing.

What history is about is human beings.

Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.

The general idea of history seems to be that it is the biography of a society…. History is to the common life of many what biography is to an individual.

A lot of people are surprised when I talk so much about the present, but politics is just a crucial part of archaeology.

I was overwhelmed with the kindness of people [in Afghanistan] and found that they had managed to retain their dignity, their pride, and their hospitality under unspeakably bleak conditions.

I have full faith in my people that they will rise to every occasion worthy of our past Islamic history, glory and traditions.

History isn't about dates and places and wars. It's about the people who fill the spaces between them.

We celebrate Thanksgiving along with the rest of America, maybe in different ways and for different reasons. Despite everything that's happened to us since we fed the Pilgrims, we still have our language, our culture, our distinct social system. Even in a nuclear age, we still have a tribal people.

For black people in the western hemisphere, if you can't generate a mythology that creates models of heroism and power out of the mythology that you had, then that means that somehow the mythology you had was not only feeble and weak, but that you are ultimately a powerless people. That's a notion that, I think, that can't be accepted.

Today, in Mexico, they speak 65 languages, counting the indigenous languages, 65. It is a people of great faith. They have also suffered religious persecution.

For people, 'here' signifies not merely a physical space, but also an historical space.

We are not buried in history, but surrounded by it. You can't avoid our behavior being shaped by it, to a considerable degree. We have this fantasy that we are free of history. This allows us not to see the circumstances, the historical circumstances of other people.

People tolerate those they fear further than those they love.

It’s history. It’s poetry.

The political and social processes by which the Western European societies were put in order are not very apparent, have been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them anymore. But most of them once scandalized people.

Knowing what I know about the people who have come before me, and the people who came before them, and what they had to do, it changes my capacity to stay engaged, to stay productive.

When you tell people, your world changes, your identity changes and people treat you differently. And then, not only do you have to deal with your own emotional response to what's going on, but you take on everybody else's emotional response.

That's always disappointed me, to see a guy in the crowd who doesn't look like he's having fun but in general if you just listen to the crowd it sounds like they're having fun. So I don't want to focus on the one guy who's not having fun. And by closing my eyes and just listening, I can't hear that he's not laughing but I can see that he's not laughing.

Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America — that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.

It is quite easy to see why a legend is treated, and ought to be treated, more respectfully than a book of history. The legend is generally made by the majority of people in the village, who are sane. The book is generally written by the one man in the village who is mad.

People have different ways of interpreting history.

Armed with the knowledge of our past, we can with confidence charter a course for our future. Culture is an indispensable weapon in the freedom struggle. We must take hold of it and forge the future with the past.

People frequently bore me, sometimes amuse me, most often irritate me, but rarely intrigue me.