Top 100 Quotes & Sayings 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.

The British deployed the men of their Indian army on the European battlefield from October 1914; the decision being made within days of the outbreak of hostilities.

A hard Brexit would be so damaging to the true interests of the UK that what might follow - if we are lucky - is a great unmasking, not just of the political fantasists and chancers who peddled the great Brexit swindle, but of the historical delusion that empowered them.

Historians are a long way from being key workers. The best place for them is at home, reading their books and keeping out of the way.

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.

Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I'm trying to put those bits back in.

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.

At 18, I stood in the Louvre in front of the paintings that TV had first shown me.

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.

In the Britain of 2019, around a third of a million of our fellow citizens are homeless.

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.

Some of the problem with IQ tests stems from the inescapable reality that human intelligence is staggeringly complex and multifaceted.

When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

The age of national leaders, or candidates for high office, has never been automatically regarded as an issue for concern.

Given that his rousing speeches play on a perpetual loop somewhere in the back of the national psyche, and the bulk of the country is unshakable in its view of Churchill as the greatest of British heroes, how can the historian see him with any clarity?

Democratically elected governments meekly requesting giant corporations to pay pitifully low levels of tax on their enormous profits is not a good look.

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.

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.

Public buildings, built from the rates and taxes paid by past generations, are being auctioned off by impoverished councils who need the money to pay the redundancies of workers they can no longer afford to employ. Many of these grand Victorian buildings will be turned into flats that most people will never be able to afford.

It was through watching documentaries on the BBC in the late 1980s that I first became interested in art and history.

The most extreme among the Brexiters are convinced they can ride the chaos and deploy the 'shock doctrine' to remake the nation in their ideological image.

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.

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.

Civilisation is slippery, the word has multiple and contested meanings.

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.

My first teenage holiday was spent touring the great art galleries of Europe after having been inspired by what I had seen on television.

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history.

It is of course perfectly possible for a university, or any institution, to carry out a rigorous investigation into the historical origins of its accumulated wealth, while at the same time putting in place systems to address modern inequalities of access and attainment.

But Johnson's Churchill-lite shtick and Theresa May's even less convincing Iron Lady routine are only even vaguely viable because they tap into a fantasy version of British history that has contaminated visions of our conceivable future.

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.

I think I was eight the first time I saw the Benin bronzes. I was taken to see them at the British Museum by my white, British mother, who felt it important that her half-Nigerian children learned about the artistic achievements of their forefathers. I've been entranced by them ever since.

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.

I only ever wanted to do history, and make documentaries.

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?

The old racism of imperialism not only rendered the postwar political elite unable to see black people as full British citizens, it provided them with a whole glossary of stereotypes and preconceptions that they then deployed in order to justify their aim of introducing immigration controls.

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.

When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical.

In the case of the second world war the distorting factor is not poetry but our seemingly insatiable need to view the war through the prism of national mythology.

Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.

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.

If you want someone to call you a traitor or accuse you of hating Britain, try suggesting that Britain is a normal nation or that our history is remarkable but not exceptional.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The easiest way to make television authentic is to make it really authentic.

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.

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.

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.

Along with never having got round to writing down our constitution and having a monarch who legally owns all the swans, one of the things that makes the UK a bit of an outlier is our university admissions system.

While everyone knows that London is both big and overprivileged when it comes to spending, the scale of its dominance is poorly understood. London is not just the biggest city in the UK, it is the biggest city in western Europe. It is also the richest region.

Ten Guinea Street is on a Historic England site.

As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.

I disagreed with my teachers on pretty much everything, including what grades I was going to get at A-level. I was sure I'd pass, they were convinced I'd fail.

Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response.

Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.

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.

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.

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.