Complex History Quotes

My family history, like that of many Polish, German and Jewish families from Central Europe in the 20th century, is complex.

This is America; our icons are complicated.

The truth is that real history was a lot more complicated than our popular understandings lead us to believe.

I made a movie to explain to the American public what had been achieved in regards to disarmament of Iraq and why inspectors aren't in Iraq today and detailing the very complex, murky history of interaction between Iraq, the United Nations and the United States. It is most definitely not a pro-Iraq movie. It is a pro-truth movie.

Real history is far more complex and interesting than the simplistic summaries presented in Wikipedia articles. Knowing this allows you to question received wisdom, to challenge 'facts' 'everybody' knows to be true, and to imagine worlds and characters worthy of our rich historical heritage and our complex selves.

The Jewish story is the story of wandering. It is the story of extraordinary heterogeneous complication.

Reducing everything immediately to good and evil is bad history - not only because it isn't true, but because reductionism is unpersuasive; it is boring. Good history, on the other hand, demands that one talk socratically - that one can present alternate viewpoints, not strawman arguments.

Many of us came away from our youth thinking that the story of the Revolution was that the Americans were patriots fighting the oppressive British. It was kind of good versus evil, liberty versus tyranny. When you get into it, you find that it was much more complicated.

History is but a confused heap of facts.

No nation has a single history, no people a single song.

Poetry is this gorgeous, complex history rendered in verse and song, a blueprint that can lead you back into the world after you've walked into air.

A friendship between Germany and Israel didn't always seem natural.

I prefer working out of strict continuity, because no normal human being can have a firm grip on the constantly shifting bardo-like territory of a comics universe, where entire histories can be erased by a strong enough super-sneeze.

History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors, and issues.

The equivocations, the confusions, the contradictions. There's no way we can live through or comprehend something so big that happened so long ago. We've lost true history. But if we are willing to tolerate the contradictions, and if we suffer through events rather than ticking them off, we may at least get closer to understanding what happened than if we grip the handrail of a carefully polished and reassuringly heroic narrative.

History does not unfold: it piles up.

For many Americans, 'Vietnam' is a word associated with war and the extraordinarily complex history between our countries. But since normalization began, the U.S. and Vietnam have steadily built bonds of partnership, demonstrating that we can recognize history without being imprisoned by it.

Love is not a state, a feeling, a disposition, but an exchange, uneven, fraught with history, with ghosts, with longings that are more or less legible to those who try to see one another with their own faulty vision.

Very few writers understand the complex history and maddening social order of the Mississippi Delta. For Steve Yarbrough, though, it's home turf. He is wickedly observant, funny, cynical, evocative, and he possesses a gift that cannot be taught: he can tell a story.

The whole history between Haiti and the Dominican Republic is complicated. We share the island of Hispaniola, and Haiti occupied the Dominican Republic for twenty-two years after 1804 for fear that the French and Spanish would come back and reinstitute slavery. So we have this unique situation of being two independent nations on the same island, but with each community having its own grievance.

China has had a long and complex history and has managed to evolve its own culture for 4,000 years. It therefore not necessarily true that we know exactly what is best for the internal structure of China.

We must do our best to raise the public awareness of the past in all its richness and complexity.

Nowhere is it ordained that history moves in a straight line.

History is a cruel tutor because its lessons are often so contradictory.

… in history, so many circumstances of a small and accidental nature are relevant, that no broad and simple uniformities are possible.