Provocative excerpts from primary and secondary sources (some with audio glosses). Read the rationale behind these sound bites for more information.

501-510 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

<  501-510  511-520  521-530  531-540  541-550  >

501) As an individual deprived of memory becomes disoriented and lost, not knowing where he has been or where he is going, so a nation denied a conception of its past will be disabled in dealing with its present and its future. (Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. 45) [SoundBite #501]

502) In my view history as a discipline is in bad shape today because it has lost sight of its origins in the literary imagination. In the interest of appearing scientific and objective, it has repressed and denied to itself its own greatest source of strength and renewal. (Hayden White, Tropic 99) [SoundBite #502]

503) We [historians] can recapture those few moments in the past which show the possibility of a better way of life than that which has dominated the Earth thus far. (Howard Zinn 47) [SoundBite #160]

504) What all this points to is the necessity of revising the distinction conventionally drawn between poetic and prose discourse in discussion of such narrative forms as historiography and recognizing that the distinction, as old as Aristotle, between history and poetry obscures as much as it illuminates about both. If there is an element of the historical in all poetry, there is an element of poetry in every historical account of the world. (Hayden White, Tropic 97-98) [SoundBite #504]

505) [There are] four principal methods of cinematic history: mixing fact with fiction, shaping evidence to deliver specific conclusions, suggesting messages for the present in stories about the past, and employing a documentary style to develop the "Great Man" perspective on the past. (Robert Brent Toplin, History 13) [SoundBite #505]

506) To be culturally literate is to possess the basic information needed to thrive in the modern world. (E. D. Hirsch, Jr. xiii) [SoundBite #506]

507) To understand the workings of the social memory it may be worth investigating the social organization of forgetting, the rules of exclusion, suppression or repression, and the question of who wants whom to forget what, and why. [What about the uses of social amnesia?] Can groups, like individuals, suppress what is inconvenient to remember? (Peter Burke 108-9) [SoundBite #507]

508) [There is] a cinematic rewriting of history currently taking shape, which stands as a particularly conspicuous attempt to rearticulate the cultural narratives that define the American nation. By interrogating the reserve of images and stories that constitute the dominant fiction, these films set forth a counternarrative of American history that ultimately attempts to reinforce social belief. (Robert Burgoyne, Film 2) [SoundBite #508]

509) The mere ideal of greatness is a force. All peoples have clung to it, and responded to it; all have their national heroes. If the immediate achievements of the hero may be discounted, the hero as symbol, or even the mythical hero, continues to make history. (Herbert J. Muller 37) [SoundBite #509]

510) The right words, says Lenin, are more powerful than a hundred regiments of men. (Peter Weisman, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #510]