Quotes About History

Christianity is] the most ... perverted system that ever shone on man.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes.

Peace is that brief glorious moment in history when everyone is standing around reloading

Sometimes it is said that man cannot be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the form of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

Is it the Fourth?

I have examined all the known superstitions of the world,and I do not find in our particular superstition of Christianity one redeeming feature. They are all alike founded on fables and mythology. Millions of innocent men women and children since the introduction of Christianity,have been burnt, tortured, fined and imprisoned. What has been the effect of this coercion? To make one half the world fools and the other half hypocrites; to support roguery and error all over the earth.

All are dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new generation whom we know not, and who know us not.

History, by apprising [the people] of the past, will enable them to judge of the future.

History is philosophy teaching by examples.

History has informed us that bodies of men, as well as individuals, are susceptible of the spirit of tyranny.

The clause too, reprobating the enslaving the inhabitants of Africa, was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and Georgia, who had never attempted to restrain the importation of slaves, and who on the contrary still wished to continue it. Our northern brethren also I believe felt a little tender under those censures; for tho' their people have very few slaves themselves yet they had been pretty considerable carriers of them to others.

Leadership is knowing how to distill complexity into a comprehensible message to reach the hearts and minds of the larger world. ~ Using philosophy and history to create emotional appeals to shape broad public sentiment.

I advance it therefore [...] that the blacks [...] are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.

The same political parties which now agitate the U.S. have existed thro' all time. Whether the power of the people or that of the "aristoi" should prevail were questions which kept the states of Greece and Rome in eternal convulsions, as they now schismatize every people whose minds and mouths are not shut up by the gag of a despot.

Sometimes it is said that man can not be trusted with the government of himself. Can he, then, be trusted with the government of others? Or have we found angels in the forms of kings to govern him? Let history answer this question.

To write these things now is to state the commonplaces of history. But to find them out in 1942, to have them break upon you from a June sky, was to suffer a fundamental shock, a derangement in that area of the brain in which stable ideas about humankind and its possibilities are kept.

There were many indications from history, Frank proposed, that threatened races generally outbred the genocides. The phallus was faster than the gun.

Far from offering structures to any history of the past, this kind of desert emptiness and exile is akin to the wilderness traditions of the monastery and the desert fathers.

Yet some men say in many parts of England that King Arthur is not dead, but had by the will of our Lord Jesu into another place... many men say that there is written upon his tomb this verse: Hic jacet Arthurus, Rex quondam, Rexque futurus. Here lies Arthur, King that was, King that will be.

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

Deep is the well of the past. Should we not call it bottomless?

Verhalen horen zich in het verleden af te spelen, en hoe verder het verleden, zou men kunnen zeggen, des te beter voor ze, in hun hoedanigheid van verhalen, én voor de verteller, wiens gemurmel de onvoltooid verleden tijd bezweert.

Se desarrolla –o, para evitar sistemáticamente el presente: se desarrolló– en otro tiempo, en el pasado, antaño, en el mundo anterior a la Gran Guerra, con cuyo estallido comenzaron muchas cosas que, en el fondo, todavía no han dejado de comenzar. Esta

Deep is the well of the past.