All Quotes By Tag: History

“It is truth, in the old saying, that is ‘the daughter of time,’ and the lapse of half a century has not left us many of our illusions. Churchill tried and failed to preserve one empire. He failed to preserve his own empire, but succeeded in aggrandizing two much larger ones. He seems to have used crisis after crisis as an excuse to extend his own power. His petulant refusal to relinquish the leadership was the despair of postwar British Conservatives; in my opinion this refusal had to do with his yearning to accomplish something that ‘history’ had so far denied him—the winning of a democratic election.”

“Fiction is written with reality and reality is written with fiction. We can write fiction because there is reality and we can write reality because there is fiction; everything we consider today to be myth and legend, our ancestors believed to be history and everything in our history includes myths and legends. Before the splendid modern-day mind was formed our cultures and civilizations were conceived in the wombs of, and born of, what we identify today as “fiction, unreality, myth, legend, fantasy, folklore, imaginations, fabrications and tall tales.” And in our suddenly realized glory of all our modern-day “advancements” we somehow fail to ask ourselves the question “Who designated myths and legends as unreality? ” But I ask myself this question because who decided that he was spectacular enough to stand up and say to our ancestors “You were all stupid and disillusioned and imagining things” and then why did we all decide to believe this person? There are many realities not just one. There is a truth that goes far beyond what we are told today to believe in. And we find that truth when we are brave enough to break away from what keeps everybody else feeling comfortable. Your reality is what you believe in. And nobody should be able to tell you to believe otherwise.”

“In history, truth should be held sacred, at whatever cost . . . especially against the narrow and futile patriotism, which, instead of pressing forward in pursuit of truth, takes pride in walking backwards to cover the slightest nakedness of our forefathers.”

“There are people who desperately want to change the world. I wonder if it could be measured, because the world is already in the state of continuously change since the beginning of time. Or they may just want their names etched nicely on men history.”

“Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.”

“He was Caesar and Pope in one; but he was Pope without Pope’s pretensions, Caesar without the legions of Caesar: without a standing army, without a bodyguard, without a palace, without a fixed revenue; if ever any man had the right to say that he ruled by the right divine, it was Mohammed, for he had all the power without its instruments and without its supports. He cared not for the dressings of power. The simplicity of his private life was in keeping with his public life.” ”

“God was never created the economy.Men found it after banished from Eden.”

“The whole of world history often seems to me nothing more than a picture book which portrays humanity’s most powerful and a senseless desire – the desire to forget. Does not each generation, by means of suppression, concealment, and ridicule, efface what the previous generation considered most important?”

“History engineered if the facts couldn’t be generally accepted.”

“Jake was close to tears. In that moment he saw the world in its true light, as a place where nothing had ever been any good and nothing of significance done: no art worth a second look, no philosophy of the slightest appositeness, no law but served the state, no history that gave an inkling of how it had been and what had happened. And no love, only egotism, infatuation and lust.”

“It is not history. But I am beginning to wonder strongly what is the nature of history. Is it only memory in decent sentences, and if so, how reliable is it? I would suggest, not very. And that therefore most truth and fact offered by these syntactical means is treacherous and unreliable. And yet I recognise that we live our lives, and even keep our sanity, by the lights of this treachery and this unreliability, just as we build our love of country on these paper worlds of misapprehension and untruth. Perhaps this is our nature, and perhaps unaccountably it is part of our glory as a creature, that we can build our best and most permanent buildings on foundations of utter dust.”

“If history is written by the victorious, what if the victors lied?”

“So obscure are the greatest events, as some take for granted any hearsay, whatever its source, others turn truth into falsehood, and both errors find encouragement with posterity.”

“But if we are all God’s children, why does God spend so much time in history ordering one branch of his universal family to wipe out another branch? Why did his love for his Jewish children have to be expressed by the extermination of his Palestinian children? Why did he later abandon his Jewish children in favour of his Christian children and encourage his new favourites to torment their older siblings? Why did he order his Muslim children who worship him as One to persecute his pagan children who worship him as Many? Why is there so much violence in religious history, all done by groups who claim God is on their side?Unless you are prepared to believe that God actually plays favourites like some kind of demented tyrant, then there are only two ways out of this dilemma. The obvious one is to decide that there is no God. What is called God is a human invention used, among other things, to justify humankind’s love of violence and hatred of strangers. Getting rid of God won’t solve the problem of human violence but it will remove one of its pretexts.”

“So yes, religion has caused and continues to cause some of the worst violence in history. And yes, it has used God to justify it. So if we mean by God the loving creator of the universe, then either he doesn’t exist or religion has got him wrong. Either way, religion should make us wary. That doesn’t necessarily mean we should abandon it altogether. We may decide to stick with it but to do so with humility, admitting the evil it has done as well as the good. It’s up to us.”