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

531-540 of 734 Sound Bites. [show all]

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531) The one duty we owe to history is to rewrite it. (Oscar Wilde) [SoundBite #531]

532) Time heals all wounds, / Smoothes, cleanses, obliterates; / History keeps the wound open, / Picks at it, makes it raw and bleeding. (Janet Malcolm) [SoundBite #532]

533) Even if a movie bends the truth a little bit, if it is still about an important issue, then it is still valuable. For an example, Mississippi Burning is a film about the brutal slayings of three civil rights workers (2 white, 1 black) by Klansmen in the deep South. Obviously, the issues involved in this film are touchy ones, and people will feel very strongly one way or another. Yet when the family members of the murdered black civil rights worker complained that the film made the WHITE civil rights workers look better than him, I feel like they are missing the point. They shouldn't be concerned about silly little details like that . . . they should be happy that his story is being told in the first place! (Lindsay Totams, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #533]

534) It is worth asking why the national novels of Latin America -- the ones that governments institutionalized in the schools and that are by now indistinguishable from patriotic histories -- are all love stories. (Doris Sommer) [SoundBite #534]

535) History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power have destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again. (Carl Sagan) [SoundBite #535]

536) One imagines filmmakers as scofflaws recklessly speeding down the road, while the upholders of scholarly rules and ideals wait vigilantly in their patrol cars, hands ready on the siren and flashing lights. (Robert Sklar) (hear audio gloss by Amy Burchard) [SoundBite #536]

537) Maybe this isn't the way it was . . . It's the way it should have been. (the film The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean) [SoundBite #537]

538) You are what you have been. (old saying) [SoundBite #538]

539) History is the skeleton out of the closet. Film is the opium for the people. (Paul Galante, Lehigh University) [SoundBite #539]

540) History, n. An account mostly false of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers mostly fools. (Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary) [SoundBite #540]