History Quotes
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In the appendix to my History of the Russian Revolution I give a detailed and documented study of the ideas of the Bolshevik party on the October revolution. This study, I hope, will make it impossible in the future to ascribe to [Vladimir] Lenin the theory of Socialism in a single country.
Quote by -Leon Trotsky
As a Jew, it is my historic responsibility to defend the Jewish people. I feel this responsibility for the survival of the Jewish people. We're not going to accept any decision by anybody else about security of the State of Israel. It is our role and only our role.
Quote by -H. L. Mencken
Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I'm trying to put those bits back in.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The refusal to accept that the black presence in Britain has a long and deep history is not just a symptom of racism, it is a form of racism. It is part of a rearguard and increasingly unsustainable defence of a fantasy monochrome version of British history.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Very occasionally, I wish I was French. The fantasy usually materialises just after a holiday, when I dream of living by the warmth of the Mediterranean, or after a trip to Paris during which I indulge fantasies of being a Left Bank cafe-bohemian.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The history of the British empire, the chapter of our national story that would have explained to my classmates why a child born in Nigeria was sat among them, was similarly missing from the curriculum.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.
Quote by -David Olusoga
When historians write the last pages of their books, and the producers of history documentaries sit down to edit the final minutes of their programmes, there is often a strong urge to look to the future and emphasise the positive.
Quote by -David Olusoga
What needs to be debated is whether IQ tests, as currently designed, are fit for purpose, and capable of measuring the changing nature of intelligence in the 21st century among generations brought up with digital technology and different learning habits.
Quote by -David Olusoga
My view as a historian is that the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution and that the history of empire is one we need to confront and come to terms with, rather than celebrate.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response.
Quote by -David Olusoga
History suggests that the disillusioned and the disaffected do not readily take to the streets nor man the barricades to defend a system that failed to defend them.
Quote by -David Olusoga
It is true that Britain and its institutions have survived past crises, but often this was because those in charge, at a certain point, snapped out of the stupor of latent optimism, recognised the dangers circling the nation and acted.
Quote by -David Olusoga
I have always been most drawn to those moments from the past when people from distant lands and different societies made contact with one another.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The nation of 2019, exponentially wealthier, appears to have a fraction of its former self-belief and little faith in its capacity to solve the latest in a long line of housing crises that stretch back to the 18th century.
Quote by -David Olusoga
In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers.
Quote by -David Olusoga
History, after all, is a process, not a position, and it is not best written in bronze and marble. It is complex, plastic and ever-changing; all things that heroic statues are not.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The easiest way to make television authentic is to make it really authentic.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The OBE, CBE and MBE are among the ways Britain honours its citizens for their contribution to national life. I wish we had agreed on a different form of words, but we haven't and the decision to change the system is above my pay grade.
Quote by -David Olusoga
I went to school in the 70s and the 80s, and the last thing I expected of my schools back then was that they would be the places in which I would be taught about black history.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Britain went to war in 1939 in the name of freedom and democracy, but fielded armies within whose ranks were black and brown men who were regarded and often treated as second-class citizens.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Historians spend their days engaged in the literally endless task of reshaping and expanding our view of the past, while statues are fixed and inflexible.
Quote by -David Olusoga
As well as remembering the service of the non-white soldiers and auxiliaries of the first world war, we have also to remember what happened to them and their dreams of justice in the months and years after the armistice.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Humans are pattern-seeking animals, consciously and subconsciously imposing designs and theories on to past events. We do this in both our private lives and when looking at history.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Since I began presenting programmes about black history my life has become a constant impromptu focus group. I am stopped in the street by people who want to talk about the histories those documentaries explore.
Quote by -David Olusoga
I was born in Africa but brought up in the north-east of England. Most of my childhood was spent living on a council estate that overlooked the Tyne and I went to the same junior school as Paul Gascoigne, of whom I have a vague memory.
Quote by -David Olusoga
What we're seeing is a backlash against any attempt, whether from the world of scholarship or popular culture, to paint non-white people back into the British past. Those of us who write about this history have long been familiar with this.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Most people involved in the delivery of history, in universities, publishing, museums and the heritage industry, are aware that we have a problem with diversity and inclusivity.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Even the building of a second British empire in the 19th century never fully healed the wound of losing America, and the end of Britain's imperial prestige after the second world war has cut deeper.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Britain in the 19th century was two things simultaneously; the hub of the largest empire on earth and the greatest manufacturing and trading nation the world had ever seen. Yet the formal empire and the trading empire were not the same thing.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Donald Trump did not cause America's democratic crisis of faith, he rode to power on it. Once in control, he and other populists discovered their room for manoeuvre was expanded by the same disillusionment that helped them into office.
Quote by -David Olusoga
By 1956, London Transport was recruiting in Barbados, even loaning migrants the costs of their passage to Britain. British Rail placed ads in the Barbados Labour Office and the NHS appealed to West Indian women to come to Britain and train to become nurses.
Quote by -David Olusoga
We nonchalantly expect that next year's smartphone will be faster and better than this year's, yet we struggle to imagine that society and our lives could progress at anything like the pace at which technology advances and we meekly accept it when things go backwards.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Britain fought the second world war with men and money partly drawn from the empire and that, after the defence of the home islands, the survival of the empire was a fundamental war aim.
Quote by -David Olusoga
The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn't get through to us in the same way.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.
Quote by -David Olusoga
To describe someone as a pessimist is to issue an insult, whereas to be labelled an optimist is to get a pat on the back. To dismiss someone's argument as pessimistic is to suggest it is the product of a personality disorder, rather than careful analysis.
Quote by -David Olusoga
At 18, I stood in the Louvre in front of the paintings that TV had first shown me.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Each year when the A-level results come out, thousands of students and their families settle down to deal with the implications - positive or otherwise - of the fact that their actual grades differ from those they had predicted by their schools.
Quote by -David Olusoga
Schools unable to keep their lights on and their doors open for the full working week is just the latest bleak instalment of a long-running show. The age of austerity returns for its ninth miserable year; always in the background, the common denominator in everything from the Brexit vote to knife crime.
Quote by -David Olusoga
When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.
Quote by -David Olusoga
I never had a black teacher or lecturer, I never once met a black British person who held any sort of professional or managerial role.
Quote by -David Olusoga
I've received tweets that I suspect people wouldn't have sent in 2015. Is that a changed country or is that people who are unpleasant feeling emboldened to speak?
Quote by -David Olusoga