All Quotes By Tag: History

“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.”

“Seen politically, systems follow one another, each consuming the previous one. They live on ever-bequeathed and ever-disappointed hope, which never entirely fades. Its spark is all that survives, as it eats its way along the blasting fuse. For this spark, history is merely an occasion, never a goal.”

“They say if you don’t know your history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Unfortunately, most Americans can’t even figure out what’s going on in the present.”

“The willingness to undertake such action cannot be based on certainties, but on those possibilities glimpsed in a reading of history different from the customary painful recounting of human cruelties. In such a reading we can find not only war but resistance to war, not only injustice but rebellion against injustice, not only selfishness but self-sacrifice, not only silence in the fact of tyranny but defiance, not only callousness but compassion.Human beings show a broad spectrum of qualities, but it is the worst of these that are usually emphasized, and the result, too often, is to dishearten us, diminish our spirit. And yet, historically, that spirit refuses to surrender.”

“Poetry is nearer to vital truth than history.”

“I don’t care what is written,” Meyer Landsman says. “I don’t care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son’s throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don’t care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat. It’s in my ex-wife’s tote bag.”