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Exlpore more History quotes
"There were in the camp a number of Mexican slaves and these ran forth calling out in spanish and were brained or shot and one of the Delawares emerged from the smoke with a naked infant dangling in each hand and squatted at a ring of midden stones and swung them by the heels each in turn and bashed their heads against the stones so that the brains burst forth through the fontanel in a bloody spew and humans on fire came shrieking forth like berserkers and the riders hacked them down with their enormous knives and a young woman ran up and embraced the bloodied forefeet of Glanton's warhorse."
"The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself."
"The course of history is determined not by battles, by sieges, or usurpation, but by the individuals. The strongest army is, at its most basic level, a collection of individuals. Their decisions, their passions, their foolishness, and their dreams shape the years to come. If there is any lesson to be learned from history, it is that all too often the fate of armies, of cities, of entire realms rests upon the actions of one person's decision, good or bad, right or wrong, big or small, can unwittingly change the world.But history can be quite the slattern. One never knows who that person is, where he might be, or what decision he might male.It is almost enough to make me believe in destiny."
"The becoming of man is the history of the exhaustion of his possibilities."
"We have a few old mouth-to-mouth tales; we exhume from old trunks and boxes and drawers letters without salutation or signature, in which men and women who once lived and breathed are now merely initials or nicknames out of some now incomprehensible affection which sound to us like Sanskrit or Chocktaw; we see dimly people, the people in whose living blood and seed we ourselves lay dormant and waiting, in this shadowy attenuation of time possessing now heroic proportions, performing their acts of simple passion and simple violence, impervious to time and inexplicable."
"The worst thing that colonialism did was to cloud our view of our past."
Explore more quotes by Harold Rosenberg
"The purpose of education is to keep a culture from being drowned in senseless repetitions, each of which claims to offer a new insight."
"The values to which the conservative appeals are inevitably caricatured by the individuals designated to put them into practice."
"No degree of dullness can safeguard a work against the determination of critics to find it fascinating."
"The differences between revolution in art and revolution in politics are enormous. Revolution in art lies not in the will to destroy but in the revelation of what has already been destroyed. Art kills only the dead."
"American time has stretched around the world. It has become the dominant tempo of modern history, especially of the history of Europe."
"America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black."
"The story of Americans is the story of arrested metamorphoses. Those who achieve success come to a halt and accept themselves as they are. Those who fail become resigned and accept themselves as they are."
"The aim of every authentic artist is not to conform to the history of art, but to release himself from it in order to replace it with his own history."
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