Quotes from Elie Kedourie

Moral indignation is a bad counsellor.

The prevalent fashion has been to proclaim the latest revolution as the herald of a new day, and the newest turbulence as the necessary and beneficent prelude to an epoch of orderliness and justice.

History does not need explanatory principles, but only words to tell how things were.

This dogmatic and insistent moralism clearly ends by seriously impairing Toynbee's judgment. He refuses to concede what common experience teaches, namely that the wicked do quite often flourish like the green bay tree, that in human affairs force and violence are occasionally decisive, or that love and gentleness are sometimes productive of evil.