“But nothing inspired me more than the fights for equal rights at the center of our history. Each generation, it became clear, was defined by whether they expanded equality, welcoming and including people who had once been excluded or rejected.”
“In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That s just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia s slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words. ... The slave codes of 1705 are among American history s most striking evidence that our nation s greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.”
“History supports those who work with it, not against it”
“In a televised appearance in June, Goldwater made remarks that permitted viewers to infer that he would look favorably on a proposal that had appeared in an Air Force journal calling for the use of low-yield nuclear weapons to defoliate the Ho Chi Minh Trail, thereby exposing the North Vietnamese and their supply convoys to attack.”
“He [John Eisenhower] followed up by presenting me with Eugene Davidson s The Trial of the Germans, a searching and exhaustive account of the Nuremberg trials complete with in-depth profiles of the Nazi defendants. Like the Bible I had received at age ten, The Trial of the Germans was one of the most treasured gifts I had”
“Johnson phoned Eisenhower often ... He wanted the comfort of communicating with someone who could comprehend the unique pressures of the presidency.”
“Julie and I had met several times and played together as eight year olds in January 1957, at the time of the second Eisenhower-Nixon inauguration. On Inauguration Day, a photograph was taken of us on the reviewing stand with Granddad, Vice President Nixon, my seven-year-old sister, Anne, and Julie s ten-year-old sister, Tricia. Julie, who had lost control of her sled the week before and crashed into a tree, had a skinned nose and dramatic black eye. At one point when the cameramen gathered to take pictures, Granddad had turned to her and whispered, Look this way and they won t see your black eye. In the resulting photograph, I am staring intently at Julie and she is looking at me.”
“History is not a conversation with the past, Instead, in Warburg, memory is carried forward to us, objectively, by the sequence of pathos-formulas. We do not choose our past, it chooses us. This was not an entirely direful story. The pathos-formulas register danger but they also ward it off, apotropaically. Art creates the psychic distance that gives mankind a chance in its struggle with hostile nature or with the gods.”
“As is so often the case, shapings of history designed to bring out lost sources of vitality call upon fictions of ethnicity or race as their medium.”
“... Pero nuestra franqueza y amor por la verdad nos obliga a retractarnos de nuestras opiniones erradas, cuando a la luz de nuevos documentos conocemos el extravío al que nos conducía el nimio respeto a la autoridad de aquellos primeros historiadores...”
“And again we confront the problem of history: it s usually the powerful who get to write it.”
“Unfortunately, I have lived long enough to know that history is often not what actually happened but what is recorded as such.”
“Here in the United States, very little effort has been made to voice formal apologies, make reparations, or pass political mandates about education. Yet this country was founded in part by genocidal policies directed at Native Americans and the enslavement of Black people. Both of these things are morally repugnant. Still I love my country. In fact, it is because I love my country that I want to make sure the mistakes of our past do not get repeated. We cannot afford to cover over the dark chapters of our history, as we have for decades upon decades. It is time for that to stop.”
“We cannot know from whose mouths the echoes of our lives will chime.”
“If Dogecoin is a joke... then I must be a mother f$cking comedian!”
“One way of thinking about a wife is that she is more or less invisible and so more or less free, provided she can remember to keep her head down long enough to stay that way.”
“As children we got so we could tell time by the sun pretty well, and would know by the light in the room when we opened our eyes that it was seven o clock and time to get up for school, and later that it was almost ten and then almost noon and almost three o clock and time to be dismissed. School ran strictly by clocks, the old Regulatorsthat Mr. Hamburger was always fiddling with, adding and subtracting paper clips on the pendulum to ahieveperfect time, but we were sensitive to light, knowing how little was available to us as winter came on, and always knew what time it was - as anyone will who leads a regular life in a familiar place. My poor great-grandpa,when his house burned down when Grandma left the bread baking in the summer kitchen oven to go visit the Berges and they built the new one facing west instead of south: they say he was confused the test of his life and never got straightened out even when he set up his bed in the parlor ( which faced north as his former bedroom had): he lived in a twilight world for some time and 5hen moved in his mind to the house he d grown up in, and in the end didn t know one day from another until he died. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, but there s more than one kind of of shadow, and when a man loses track, it can kill him. Not even the siren could have saved my great- grandpa. He died of misdirection. /”