Quotes About History

Medicare and Social Security have created the healthiest and most financially secure generation of senior citizens in American history.

My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.

I still have my original social security card signed when I was 13.

Since the end of the 1970s, free-market capitalism has been in, and socialism has been out.

In fact, there is an academic blackout about the atrocities perpetrated in the name of communism and socialism.

I belonged to the generation that grew up under National Socialism, and was blinded and led astray - and allowed itself to be led astray.

Marxism conceives of the new system of socialism as the necessary outcome of all previous history made possible and necessary only by that previous history.

I started work on my first French history book in 1969; on 'Socialism in Provence' in 1974; and on the essays in Marxism and the French Left in 1978. Conversely, my first non-academic publication, a review in the 'TLS', did not come until the late 1980s, and it was not until 1993 that I published my first piece in the 'New York Review.'

The historical experience of socialist countries has sadly demonstrated that collectivism does not do away with alienation but rather increases it, adding to it a lack of basic necessities and economic inefficiency.

The NAACP was not a black-run, black-originated organization. It was run by 21 white, socialist, atheist, Marxist Democrats. It was the antithesis of Rev. Martin Luther King Sr.'s community at that time, which was capitalist, Christian, very pro-life, and pro-America.

A lot of populists after populism died just became socialists. At the beginning of the 20th century, socialism looked like it was going to take off. It didn't, of course, but a lot of people thought it was going to.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

I have been a lot of 'firsts' on the national political stage, including the first African American congressman from the Bay Area and one of the first Democratic Socialists in Congress.

Labour has a complex history with racism and internationalism. Political education about antisemitism and all forms of racism can help us reckon with that history, and ensure a socialist politics based on real equality becomes the common sense across the party.

The environment of San Francisco has so much history to it that I really appreciate. Musically, socially, and culturally. There's this new culture of people; it's a crazy place to be.

Without an understanding of history, we are politically, culturally and socially impoverished. If we sacrifice history to economic pressures or to budget cuts, we will lose a part of who we are.

I see history as really cyclical in terms of the intense idealism and the desire to create a better life outside of societal norms. In America, possibly because of whatever the American dream is, this happens over and over again. These eras repeat.

We can never run away from our past. The past will catch up to us because it is us. It is a part of us; it's what makes us we are. It's what delineates the borders of our societies.

Crime fiction is the fiction of social history. Societies get the crimes they deserve.

The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

Whatever their relative valuation of the single and married states, most societies in history made sharp distinctions between those who married and those who remained single: They were seen as mutually exclusive ways of life, with different legal rights and social obligations.

Homer, Hesiod, Pythagoras, Plato, and Cicero, just to name a few, all lived in pagan societies. Some of the greatest political and military leaders of all time, such as Alexander the Great, Pericles of Athens, Hannibal of Carthage, and Julius Caesar of Rome, were all pagans, or else living in a pagan society.

All societies are historical.

One of the enduring problems with certain societies in the world - and this is certainly true of a lot of places in the Middle East - is that the capacity for self-governance and self-organizing just isn't there. It has to do with history.