It was a bizarre happening, an unprecedented situation, a grotesque situation, an almost unbelievable mischance.

There are things that happen and leave no discernible trace, are not spoken of or written of, though it would be wrong to say that subsequent events go on indifferently, all the same, as though such things had never been.

We don’t keep records of our history and this is a sad reality of who we are.

That history just unfolds, independently of a specified direction, of a goal, no one is willing to admit.

History is idle gossip about a happening whose truth is lost the instant it has taken place.

Those who are making history seldom have time to record it.

In politics, what's not reported might as well not have happened.

الأحداث الهامة تقع فجأة و بلا سابق إنذار ...

Forgetfulness, the unhistorical, is … the atmosphere, in which alone life can come into being. In order to understand it, let us imagine a youth who is seized with a passion for a woman, or a man who is swayed by a passion for his work. In both cases what lies behind them has ceased to exist and yet this state (the most unhistorical that can be imagined) is that in which every action, every great deed is conceived and accomplished.

It is my conviction that when events are forgotten, buried in the cellar of the page, they are no longer even history.

With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning.

History moves in strange ways.

And it seemed to him as he drove on day after day that history was like some vast thing that was always over the tight horizon, invisible except in its effects. It was what happened when you weren’t looking—an unknowable infinity of events, which although out of control, controlled everything.

A tormenting thought: as of a certain point, history was no longer real. Without noticing it, all mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction.