Historical Pain Quotes

South Africans must recall the terrible past so that we can deal with it, forgiving where forgiveness is necessary but never forgetting.

Beating children has been a depressingly familiar habit in Black families since our arrival in the new world.

Bury my heart at Wounded Knee.

Acts of injustice done Between the setting and the rising sun In history lie like bones, each one

The expression if history in things is no other than that of past torment.

Just take Germany and the suffering of Jews during and after the Second World War. It would be legal to ridicule and to laugh at this suffering, but since it was such a trauma on the European conscience, no one is going to do it. It is an open scar, an open wound, an open reality.

Over the years, he disappeared - like a lot of our leaders disappear. [James Baldwin] was not assassinated, but somehow he went through those assassinations as if it was himself. I think that broke him as well.

History is nothing more than a tableau of crimes and misfortunes

The other thing is even the Jews in the course - even though metaphorically aligning themselves with Indians, and, you know, you have genocide aligning itself with another genocide.

Language remains a formidable frontier in the legacy of slavery.

The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.

Every country has a dark side of their history.

History is but a kind of Newgate calendar, a register of the crimes and miseries that man has inflicted on his fellow-man.

I have not changed my opinion that the Holocaust is a trauma of European civilization.

Black people comprehend the South. We understand its weight. It has rested on our backs... I knew that my heart would break if ever I put my foot down on that soil, moist, still, with old hurts. I had to face the fear/loathing at its source or it would consume me whole.

The issue is whether or not Americans such as myself ... will have to suffer the indignity of being reminded time and time again that at one point in this country's history, we were human chattel. This vote is about race ... and the single most painful episode in American history.

I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.

There is little for the great part of the history of the world except the bitter tears of pity and the hot tears of wrath.

When someone asks me about violence, I just find it incredible, because what it means is that the person who’s asking that question has absolutely no idea what black people have gone through, what black people have experienced in this country, since the time the first black person was kidnapped from the shores of Africa.

Time and distance from the first and second world wars doesn't seem to lessen their horrors.

It's not that I'm afraid of death, but afraid of the thought of my people laid to rest; They saying there is 6 million ways of death but not even one way to fade the stress.

Oh, Black known and unknown poets, how often have your auctioned pains sustained us? Who will compute the lonely nights made less lonely by your songs, or by the empty pots made less tragic by your tales? If we were a people much given to revealing secrets, we might raise monuments and sacrifice to the memories of our poets, but slavery cured us of that weakness.

Don't hesitate to learn the most painful aspects of our history, understand it.

We are still living in the aftershock of Hiroshima, people are still the scars of history.

Actually, some of the things I experienced as a child still linger on; what the white man has done to the black people in the south!