"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."

History,

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"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."

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"Dr. Rex Curry, the professor and attorney from Florida, has debated and largely proven the unavoidable evidence that Hitler's National Socialism was significantly influenced by Bellamy's 'nationalistic' form of 'socialism.' Curry is famous for making the claim that Hitler adopted the 'stiff-arm salute' from Francis and Edward Bellamy."

A.E. Samaan, American Author

History, Ideology, Influence, Politics

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each man's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility."

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Poet

History, Life, Enemies, Man

"This land on which so many centuries have left their mark is merely an obligatory retreat for you, whereas it has always been our dearest hope. Your too sudden passion is made up of spite and necessity."

Albert Camus, French Philosopher

History, Land, Hope, Passion, Necessity

"In the legal respect, after the execution of the supposed incendiaries, the other half of Moscow burned down."

Leo Tolstoy, Russian Novelist

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"Up to 90% of all inventions of the world comes from the Protestant world."

Sunday Adelaja, Nigerian Author

History, Invention, Protestant, Innovation

"And out of that hopeless attempt has come nearly all that we call human history-money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery-the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy."

C. S. Lewis, British Author

History, Humanity, Ambition, Conflict

"Violent men have not been known in history to die to a man. They die up to a point."

Mahatma Gandhi, Indian Leader

History, Men, Man

"Gandhi sacrificed India for his own fame and recognition. Without Gandhi, there would have been a different India; a very masculine one."

M.F. Moonzajer, Afghan Author

History, Fame, Recognition, Politics

"They shout that they want to shape a better future, but it's not true. The future is only an indifferent void no one cares about,but the past is filled with life, and its countenance is irritating, repellent, wounding, to the point that we want to destroy it or repaint it. We want to be the masters of the future only for the power to change the past. We fight for access to the labs where we can retouch photos and rewrite biographies and history."

Milan Kundera, Czechoslovakian Writer

History, Future, Past, Memory, Power

"What connexion can there be, between the place in Lincolnshire, the house in town, the Mercury in powder, and the whereabout of Jo the outlaw with the broom, who had that distant ray of light upon him when he swept the churchyard-step? What connexion can there have been between many people in the innumerable histories of this world, who, from opposite sides of great gulfs, have, nevertheless, been very curiously brought together!"

Charles Dickens, English Novelist

History, Connection, Mystery, Fate

Explore more quotes by Derek Walcott

"If you know what you are going to write when you're writing a poem, it's going to be average."

Writing,

"The sigh of History rises over ruins, not over landscapes, and in the Antilles there are few ruins to sigh over, apart from the ruins of sugar estates and abandoned forts."

History,

"Visual surprise is natural in the Caribbean; it comes with the landscape, and faced with its beauty, the sigh of History dissolves."

History, Beauty

"The English language is nobody's special property. It is the property of the imagination: it is the property of the language itself."

Language, Property

"This is Port of Spain to me, a city ideal in its commercial and human proportions, where a citizen is a walker and not a pedestrian, and this is how Athens may have been before it became a cultural echo."

Athens, Echo, May, Spain

"We make too much of that long groan which underlines the past."

Past,

"Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole."

Love,

"A culture, we all know, is made by its cities."

Cities, Culture

"Memory that yearns to join the centre, a limb remembering the body from which it has been severed, like those bamboo thighs of the god."

God, Body, Memory

"The personal vocabulary, the individual melody whose metre is one's biography, joins in that sound, with any luck, and the body moves like a walking, a waking island."

Biography, Body, Luck, Sound