Quotes About History And Identity

#1. You have been immortal since before you were born and will be long after the body dissolves. The body is Consciousness; never born; never dies; only changes. The mind - your ego, personal beliefs, history, and identity - is all that ends at death.

Dan Millman

#2. Every human character appears only once in the history of human beings. And so does every event of love.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

#3. How a people eats is one of the most powerful ways they have to express, and preserve, their cultural identity...To make food choices more scientific is to empty them of their ethnic content and history; --Harvey Levenstein

Michael Pollan

#4. Perhaps finding out that we carry New World history in our genes will transcend racial checkboxes altogether and enable Latino-Americans to rethink what America is supposed to look like.

Raquel Cepeda

#5. Symbols give us our identity, our self image, our way of explaining ourselves to ourselves and to others. Symbols in turn determine the kinds of stories we tell, and the stories we tell determine the kind of history we make and remake.

Mary Robinson

#6. And all these things she always counted on to revisit, they made up a map, the map of a true home. It was the only place where she felt she had an identity and a history behind her.

Effrosyni Moschoudi

#7. A poem I write is not just about me; it is about national identity, not just regional but national, the history of people in relation to other people. I reach for these outward stories to make sense of my own life, and how my story intersects with a larger public history.

Natasha Trethewey

#8. My basic point being that stories are at the heart of what explorers and novelists say about strange regions of the world; they also become the method colonized people use to assert their own identity and the existence of their own history.

Edward W. Said

#9. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

Joan Didion

#10. "I was born in the US and l have lived in Mexico since 1946. I believe that all these states of being have influenced my work and made it what you see today. I am inspired by Black people and Mexican people, my two peoples. My art speaks for both my peoples" ~ Elizabeth Catlett

Melanie Anne Herzog

#11. Maybe we've been brainwashed by 130 years of Yankee history, but Southern identity now has more to do with food, accents, manners, music than the Confederate past. It's something that's open to both races, a variety of ethnic groups and people who move here.

John Shelton Reed

#12. Throughout its history, the United States has always had a class system. It is not only directed by the top 1 percent and supported by a contented middle class. We can no longer ignore the stagnant, expendable bottom layers of society in explaining the national identity. The

Nancy Isenberg

#13. Throwing off despotism and tyranny is our history and part of our national identity - something in which we can take incredible pride.

Mike Crapo

#14. [Concerning postmodernism:] The aim of this experimental history is to disturb the ontological security of modern identity and hence to provoke the possibility of otherness through exposition of the cultural difference concealed by, and within, the order of modern rationalism.

Nicholas Gane

#15. Storytelling is an essential part of our cultural and human identity...when we become afraid of stories outside the mainstream, I believe we have lost a valuable part of our cultural inheritance and growth.

Louise Sommer

#16. But how can I learn to live in a world that doesn't include my brother? All my life, I've always been my brother's sister; it's part of my identity, part of who I am. My brother is part of my past; we share a common history. And we had plans for the future.

T.J. Wray

#17. The most frequently cited artists and curators travel extensively and there is a real difference in saying whether concepts and other contributions to the current contemporary arts agenda bear a recognizable cultural, or even national, identity.

Charlotte Bydler

#18. Bound by a common identity grounded in language and history, the Arabs are all the more fascinating for their diversity. They are one people and many peoples at the same time.

Eugene Rogan

#19. Everything about the house was rich, and dense, and rooted. It was everything I wasn't. Even the air, with its distinct smell of oak wood and sage, spoke to its identify and its history. I couldn't help but feel small here. Overwhelmed. Incompatible.

Bianca Scardoni

#20. Recognizing Quebec as being different, recognizing our history, recognizing our identity, has never meant a weakening of Quebec and has never been a threat to national unity.

Jean Charest

#21. Hold unto your Dreams and Visions for our heros past
did and history have written their names in Gold

Ikechukwu Joseph

#22. We should feel empowered by where we came from and who we are, not hide it. It is important to acknowledge that everything we do affects our ancestors as much as they have affected us.

Lorin Morgan-Richards

#23. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#24. Here. Where I am anonymous and alone in a white room with no history and no parading. So I can make something unknown in the shape of this room. Where I am King of Corners.

Michael Ondaatje

#25. Americans lack any deeper appreciation of class. Beyond white anger and ignorance is a far more complicated history of class identity that dates back to America's colonial period and British notions of poverty.

Nancy Isenberg

#26. With the sensation that he was passing through the Looking-Glass, Max stared at his father as if he had never seen him before - simultaneously impressed and unnerved at the thought that, after all these years, he still knew so little about him.

Sol Luckman

#27. Until the company believes in itself, AOL didn't have its own space and identity in the marketplace. The opportunity is to get out from under the negative history and figure out the value AOL offers for consumers and for publishers and advertisers.

Tim Armstrong

#28. It was the slave's continuing desire for recognition that was the motor which propelled history forward, not the idle complacency and unchanging self-identity of the master

Francis Fukuyama

#29. There is enough Christianity in our country's history to make it a significant component of our heritage and identity.

Joel Hunter

#30. Those words ... national and portrait. They were both to do with identity: the identity of a culture (place, language and history), the identity of an individual human being as an object for mimetic representation.

A.S. Byatt

#31. The oneness of the universe, and the oneness of each element of the universe, repeat themselves to the crack of doom in the creative advance from creature to creature, each creature including in itself the whole of history and exemplifying the self-identity of things and their mutual diversities.

Alfred North Whitehead

#32. Teaching the history of the British Empire links in with that of the world: for better and for worse, the Empire made us what we are, forming our national identity. A country that does not understand its own history is unlikely to respect that of others.

Antony Beevor

#33. the symbolic dimensions of disaster and recovery cannot be separated from political history. Even as buildings and memorials become the touchstones of memory and identity, they are also implicated in larger social, cultural, and political processes.

Lawrence J. Vale

#34. I think that's what makes many Swedes jealous of immigrant groups. You have a culture, an identity, a history, something that brings you together. And what do we have? We have Midsummer's Eve and such silly things.

Mona Sahlin

#35. To be human is to be 'a' human, a specific person with a life history and idiosyncrasy and point of view; artificial intelligence suggest that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity.

Brian Christian

#36. Identity is the history that has gone into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become what we are at this moment.

Nick Joaquin

#37. That which we remember is, more often than not, that which we would like to have been; or that which we hope to be. Thus our memory and our identity are ever at odds; our history ever a tale told by inattentive idealists.

Ralph Ellison

#38. We can spend our lives letting the world tell us who we are. Sane or insane. Saints or sex addicts. Heroes or victims. Letting history tell us how good or bad we are. Letting our past decide our future. Or we can decide for ourselves. And maybe it's our job to invent something better.

Chuck Palahniuk

#39. We don't see the global citizen as someone with no identity, but rather someone who has confidence and is proud of his culture and history - and ... open to the modern world.

Mozah Bint Nasser Al Missned

#40. No other society in the history of the world has searched so long for a meaningful cultural identity and failed in its quest as has America, the land of You Are What You Do.

Lester D. Langley

#41. History is prone to mistakes in identity, and facts are not always solid things.

Sarah Churchwell