Rewriting History Quotes

The real war will never get in the books. ~ Walt Whitman

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history. ~ George Orwell

Hillary has already gotten a record $8 million advance from Simon & Schuster for the book
reportedly the most anyone has ever received for rewriting history. ~ Ann Coulter

A play is a blueprint of an event: a way of creating and rewriting history through the medium of literature. Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history--that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, dismembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to--through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life--locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. ~ Suzan-Lori Parks

Old Mother Hubbard
Went to the cupboard
To get her dear dog a bone.
Though the cupboard was bare,
When she focused elsewhere
Her heart overflowed with fun! ~ Kristen McKee

He always says that those who control the present can rewrite the past. ~ Anne Fortier

By its very nature, history is always a one-sided account. ~ Dan Brown

What you do in this world is a matter of no consequence. The question is what can you make people believe you have done. ~ Arthur Conan Doyle

You may have to fight a battle more than once to win it. ~ Margaret Thatcher

Studying history aims to loosen the grip of the past. It enables us to turn our head this way and that, and begin to notice possibilities that our ancestors could not imagine, or didn't want us to imagine. By observing the accidental chain of events that led us here, we realise how our very thoughts and dreams took shape – and we can begin to think and dream differently. Studying history will not tell us what to choose, but at least it gives us more options.
Movements seeking to change the world often begin by rewriting history, thereby enabling people to reimagine the future. Whether you want workers to go on a general strike, women to take possession of their bodies, or oppressed minorities to demand political rights – the first step is to retell their history. The new history will explain that 'our present situation is neither natural nor eternal. Things were different once. Only a string of chance events created the unjust world we know today. If we act wisely, we can change that world, and create a much better one.' This is why Marxists recount the history of capitalism; why feminists study the formation of patriarchal societies; and why African Americans commemorate the horrors of the slave trade. They aim not to perpetuate the past, but rather to be liberated from it. ~ Yuval Noah Harari

We're constantly changing facts, rewriting history to make things easier, to make them fit in with our preferred version of events. We do it automatically. We invent memories. Without thinking. If we tell ourselves something happened often enough we start to believe it, and then we can actually remember it. ~ S.J. Watson

History is a set of lies agreed upon. ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

Sophie Kruger had worked in a house herself, up in Middle Swan. But now she pretended she was quality. There were none so self-righteous as those who rewrote their past. ~ Sandra Dallas

Quoting someone and rewriting their words makes it a quote from you and not them any longer. To change the meaning of someone's words without permission is offensive enough, to then contact the quoted person and try to justify it to them is even worse. It's verbatim or bust! ~ Stewart Stafford

Peter, Peter Pumpkin Eater,
Had a wife and couldn't keep her.
Of course you cannot keep a wife-
Everyone's got to live their life! ~ Kristen McKee

There was a little girl
Who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good, she was very, very good.
And when she was "bad",
Her Papa loved her anyway. ~ Kristen McKee

Thus, towards the end of the eighteenth century a change came about which, if I were rewriting history, I should describe more fully and think of greater importance than the Crusades or the Wars of the Roses. The middle-class woman began to write. For if Pride and Prejudice matters, and Middlemarch and Villette and Wuthering Heights matter, then it matters far more than I can prove in an hour's discourse that women generally, and not merely the lonely aristocrat shut up in her country house among her folios and her flatterers, took to writing. ~ Virginia Woolf

[He] looked at her as though she'd lost her mind, and [she] had her first experience of men rewriting history. I did no such thing [he said] ~ Jude Deveraux

That's how it is with legends. The greater they sound, the more must've got left out. ~ Tim Tharp

One of the hardest things about my emotional awakening was the way it reshaped so many of my memories. It may sound crazy, but all too often, it turned formerly good memories bad. And there's no balance. There's not a single bad memory that's now turned to good. (Page 211, the first paragraph of the "Rewriting History" chapter) ~ John Elder Robison

No matter what historians claimed, BC really stood for Before Coffee. ~ Cherise Sinclair

Don't be so caught up in the noble cause of responsibility that you lose your passion for who you are living for. ~ Shannon L. Alder

The Clinton presidency has at last stumbled on its rendezvous with history: While Ronald Reagan and George Bush presided over the fall of Communism, Mr. Clinton presides over the rise of Viagra. It may not be true that any young boy can grow up to be president. But at least, thanks to Viagra, any young boy can grow up to be this president. ~ Mark Steyn

I felt sure, glaring at the children as they settled onto the sand with their shovels, that these creatures were never threatened by the grimness of history, either.

Then, looking down on their glossy heads, I realized that they were indeed threatened; they were simply unaware of it. We were all vulnerable. ~ Elizabeth Kostova

As commonly practised, philosophy is the attempt to find good reasons for conventional beliefs'
'There is no mechanism of selection in the history of ideas akin to that of the natural selection of genetic mutations in evolution'
'Human knowledge is one thing, human well-being is another.There is no predetermined harmony between the two'
'In the struggle for life, the taste for truth is a luxury-or else a disability ~ John Gray

Ten years later, I will be able to say, "I saw future happen". And, this is the most rewarding part of what I do. ~ Sharad Vivek Sagar

When you say things like, 'We have to wipe out the Taliban,' what does that mean? The Taliban is not a fixed number of people. The Taliban is an ideology that has sprung out of a history that, you know, America created anyway. ~ Arundhati Roy

Then I realized my early work did have something special that audiences adored apart from what I humbly thought about them. They occupy a distinguished niche in Italian film history and probably always will. ~ Dario Argento

Democracy in itself does not define or guarantee a free society. History has told many stories of democratic societies that have degenerated into corruption, plunder, and tyranny. ~ Richard Ebeling

All objects, all phases of culture are alive. They have voices. They speak of their history and interrelatedness. And they are all talking at once! ~ Camille Paglia

Goethe (I don't know why, but Goethe somehow always speaks up in my critical moments) said: "Man must experience his own destiny" - not a factual destiny forced on him by History, but the nonrecurrent, his very own. Perhaps this was possible a hundred years ago. At the time of the French Revolution and also of the Napoleonic Wars, an individual still had the means of turning against the collective destiny adroitly, cunningly. He could hide or build emergency dams hastily in his soul. And a hundred years ago when someone mounted the scaffold or fell on the battlefield, he knew that what was then being consummated personally was his destiny. But today? There is no longer a "personal destiny;" there are only statistical probabilities. One cannot feel it to be personal destiny when an atom bomb explodes or when a dictatorship enunciates an outmoded, stupid judgment on a society. This is why I must go somewhere from this place where, perhaps, it will be possible for me to live my own destiny for a time. Because here I have already become only a piece of data in a category. ~ Sandor Marai

You take enough blasting gelatin and wrap the foundation columns of anything, you can topple any building in the world. You have to tamp it good and tight with sandbags so the blast goes against the column and not out into the parking garage around the column.
This how-to stuff isn't in any history book. ~ Chuck Palahniuk

Again! It was like the question asked by Tennyson about the flower in the crannied wall. That is, to answer it might involve the history of the universe. ~ Saul Bellow

In the spiritual reality of the church, neither Marcel Lefebvre, nor his bishops and priests, nor the people who frequent the SSPX chapels suffered or suffer excommunication. I believe history will record that the intent to impose such an excommunication was invalid and illicit. ~ Malachi Martin

When Design become Useless it becomes Art. Yesterday's Artisans are today's Artists. ~ Vineet Raj Kapoor

We don't want to think about our weaknesses. We don't want to talk about them, and we certainly don't want anyone else to point them out. This is a classic sign of mediocrity, and this mediocrity has a firm grip on the Church and humanity at this moment in history. ~ Matthew Kelly

Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity. ~ George F. Kennan

I'll be honest with you. I'm a little bit of a loner. It's been a big part of my maturing process to learn to allow people to support me. I tend to be very self-reliant and private. And I have this history of wanting to work things out on my own and protect people from what's going on with me. ~ Kerry Washington

After all, this situation, a similar one, is bound to roll around again, in a different context, a different history. Everything does. And the next time, will we (humankind) recognise it and do better? ~ Doris Lessing

What does seem to me poisonous, what breeds a type of patriotism that is pernicious if it lasts but not likely to last long in an educated adult, is the perfectly serious indoctrination of the young in knowably false or biased history - the heroic legend drably disguised as text-book fact. With this creeps in the tacit assumption that other nations have not equally their heroes; perhaps even the belief - surely it is very bad biology - that we can literally 'inherit' tradition. ~ C.S. Lewis

God created us for love, for union, for forgiveness and compassion and, yet, that has not been our storyline. That has not been our history. ~ Richard Rohr

The Russian action in Chechnya could be likened to the British Army reducing Edinburgh to rubble and expelling a couple of million Scottish people in response to a unilateral declaration of independence by Scotland ~ Amjad M. Jaimoukha

You mustn't throw them away. Let me have them. ~ Diane Samuels

the word that the Buddha used for suffering, dukkha, actually has the more subtle meaning of "pervasive unsatisfactoriness," I was even more impressed. "Suffering" always sounded a bit melodramatic, even if a careful reading of history seemed to support it. "Pervasive unsatisfactoriness ~ Mark Epstein

About me as a drinker: I wasn't much of one and had a short, bad history of doing it. The few times I'd tried drinking I either became too much like myself or not enough, but either way it was always calamity on top of calamity and I found myself saying way too much about too little and doing the wrong things in the wrong places. Once, at my boss's Christmas party, I passed out for a minute - passed out but still, like a zombie, remained fully ambulatory and mostly functional - and when I came to, I found myself in my boss's kitchen, the refrigerator door open and me next to it at the counter, spreading mayonnaise onto two slices of wheat bread and licking the knife after each pass before I stuck it back in the jar. I heard someone cough or gag, looked up, and saw the kitchen's population staring at me, all of their mouths open and slack, obviously wondering what I thought I was doing, exactly, and all I could think to say was, "Sandwich." Which is what I said. And then, to prove my point, whatever the point was, I ate it. The sandwich, that is. ~ Brock Clarke

Barack Obama has come closer than any figure in recent history to obeying a direct call of the people to the brutal and bloody fields of political mission. ~ Michael Eric Dyson

The surrealist thinks he has outstripped the whole of literary history when he has written (here a word that there is no need to write) where others have written "jasmines, swans and fauns." But what he has really done has been simply to bring to light another form of rhetoric which hitherto lay hidden in the latrines. ~ Jose Ortega Y Gasset

Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao's leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history. ~ David Rockefeller

She is the first head of government in history to give a whole country its second childhood. ~ Simon Hoggart

Seen as a process of imitation, it becomes understandable why the Westernization of a backward country so often breeds a violent antagonism toward the West. People who become like us do not necessarily love us. The sense of inferiority inherent in the act of imitation breeds resentment. The impulse of the imitators is to overcome the model they imitate - to surpass it, leave it behind, or, better still, eliminate it completely. Now and then in history the last was done first: the imitators began by destroying the model and then proceeded to imitate it. We are apparently most at ease when we imitate a defeated or dead model. ~ Eric Hoffer

Great quotation collections glean the millennia, distill essences, and battle for bragging rights about who's bigger, who's smarter, who's best. Who-knows-who-said-what has a market, a history, and a hall of fame. ~ Willis Regier

Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world. ~ Don DeLillo

Personally, my interests are ancient history and ancient civilizations. In my own life, I'd like to go to places like Easter Island. ~ Nicolas Cage

1926 was the most significant year. Looking back, it seems that it was not just a year in the sense of time. It was a year of great realisation or awareness. It seems to me that at certain times of the history of man, the understanding of certain situations ripens. ~ Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe

Your impact in life is a memory that lives forever thus be creative in positivity. ~ Oscar Auliq-Ice

Sometimes your passion must go up in flames before you can go down in history. ~ Curtis Tyrone Jones

He can neither read nor write and in him broods already a taste for mindless violence. All history present in that visage, the child the father of the man. ~ Cormac McCarthy