All Quotes By Tag: History

“To delight in literature is to desire to learn.”

“For when all else is done, on­ly words re­main. Words en­dure.”

“here’s a toast to Alan Turingborn in harsher, darker timeswho thought outside the containerand loved outside the linesand so the code-breaker was brokenand we’re sorryyes now the s-word has been spokenthe official conscience woken– very carefully scripted but at least it’s not encrypted –and the story does suggesta part 2 to the Turing Test:1. can machines behave like humans?2. can we?”

“Alle disse skæbner. Vi er så forgængelige, vi mennesker. Når vi er børn, skuer vi ind i evigheden; når vi ældes, ser vi tilbage og ved at det kun var et fingerknips, et glimt i tiden, at vore dage var som regndråber der falder i havet.”

“I realize that what happened in Bosnia could happen anywhere in the world, particularly in places that are diverse and have a history of conflict. It only takes bad leadership for a country to go up in flames, for people of different ethnicity, color, or religion to kill each other as if they had nothing in common whatsoever. Having a democratic constitution, laws that secure human rights, police that maintain order, a judicial system, and freedom of speech don’t ultimately guarantee long lasting peace. If greedy or bloodthirsty leaders come to power, it can all go down. It happened to us. It can happen to you.”

“History is gossip that’s been legitimized, and that’s really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They’d be right at home on reality tv.”

“Many of our problems are broadly similar to those that undermined … Norse Greenland, and that many other past societies also struggled to solve. Some of those past societies failed (like the Greenland Norse) and others succeeded … The past offers us a rich database from which we can learn in order that we may keep on succeeding.”

“Give me liberty or give me death.”[From a speech given at Saint John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia on March 23, 1775 to the Virginia House of Burgesses; as first published in print in 1817 in William Wirt’s Life and Character of Patrick Henry.]”

“When will we collectively see together that the history of the world played no role in preventing negative events similar to those of the past from ever happening again in this lifetime? Everything just keeps senselessly repeating itself. That is because, as humans, we forget too quickly. Our forgetfulness is our species’ greatest fault. Our negligence to tap into accessible existing knowledge to prevent new disasters from recurring is unforgiving. We are too arrogant, too proud and too lazy to adapt old ideas that may have worked, let alone invent some new ones. Yet most importantly, the greatest obstacle to our evolution is that WE ARE TOO DIVIDED.”

“The process of secularisation arises not from the loss of faith but from the loss of social interest in the world of faith. It begins the moment men feel that religion is irrelevant to the common way of life and that society as such has nothing to do with the truths of faith.”

“Why do many believers insist on repeatedly pointing to the crimes of 20th century dictators who led officially atheistic societies as some sort of evidence of their god’s existence? It makes no sense.If the rivers of blood on Stalin’s hands and Mao’s hands, for example, are supposed to prove there is a god, then what do the oceans of blood on the hands of several thousand years’ worth of religious kings, queens, presidents, popes, priests, generals, Crusadersm jihadists and tribal chiefs prove? It’s not, of course, but if bodycount is somehow the measure of a god’s likelihood of existence, then believers lose.It is clear that humans are quite capable of killing with or without images of gods bouncing around in their heads. If anything, however, history suggests that the concept of gods makes the idea of massacring your fellow man (and women and children, too, of course) a lot easier to act upon.”

“Before God and high heaven, is there a law for one man which is not a law for every other man?”

“Because you have no memory for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, you’re still mouthing the same nonsense as two thousand years ago. Worse, you cling with might and main to such absurdities as ‘race,’ ‘class,’ ‘nation,’ and the obligation to observe a religion and repress your love.”

“When the government puts its imprimatur on a particular religion it conveys a message of exclusion to all those who do not adhere to the favored beliefs. A government cannot be premised on the belief that all persons are created equal when it asserts that God prefers some.”

“Our young Women are the Future of Liberia. When we educate them, we educate Liberia.”