Quotes About History

This book is, among other things, a summons to pessimism. What is needed now, and what it is especially incumbent on conservatives to provide, is intelligent pessimism that is more than a mere mood. It should be a mentality grounded in a philosophic tradition that has a distinguished pedigree, and that is validated by abundant historical evidence for this proposition: Nothing lasts.

Multiculturalism attacks individualism by defining people as mere manifestations of groups (racial, ethnic, sexual) rather than as self-defining participants in a free society. And one way to make racial, ethnic, or sexual identity primary is to destroy alternative sources of individuality and social cohesion, such as a shared history, a common culture, and unifying values and virtues.

John Cochrane notes: "Rich people mostly give away or reinvest their wealth. It's hard to see just how this is a problem.…Look at Versailles. Nobody, not even Bill Gates, lives like Marie Antoinette. And nobody in the US lives like her peasants.

Anger does not make history. Power does. And power may be supplemented by anger, but it derives from more fundamental realities; geography, demographics, technology, and culture.

A century is about events. A decade is about people.

Here is the irony: Europe dominated the world, but it failed to dominate itself. For five hundred years Europe tore itself apart in civil wars, and as a result there was never a European empire—there was instead a British empire, a Spanish empire, a French empire, a Portuguese empire, and so on.

America is a country in which the storm is essential to clear the way for the calm. Because Americans, obsessed with the present and future, have difficulty remembering the past, they will all believe that there has never been a time as uncivil and tense as this one.

This highlights the single most important geopolitical fact in the world: the United States controls all of the oceans. No other power in history has been able to do this. And that control is not only the foundation of America's security but also the foundation of its

We should remember what Bismarck said in 1888: "If there is ever another war in Europe, it will come out of some damned silly thing in the Balkans." Balkan

Rome wasn't planned, and neither did it just happen.

The Enlightenment sought to rid the world of myths, but the nation could not justify itself without them.

En los últimos quinientos años, Europa fue el centro del sistema internacional, y sus imperios crearon un sistema global por primera vez en la historia humana.

It is interesting to note that Copernicus was German/Polish, Luther was German, and Gutenberg was German.

since the EU was created, there have been more wars in Europe than between 1945 and 1992. Many

In the fog of history and myth, the American role in championing and underwriting European integration is frequently forgotten, along with the resistance of the Europeans.

The history of the twenty-first century, therefore, particularly the first half, will revolve around two opposing struggles. One will be secondary powers forming coalitions to try to contain and control the United States. The second will be the United States acting preemptively to prevent an effective coalition from forming.

In 711 Muslim armies went north into Spain, ultimately occupying it and crossing the Pyrenees into France. In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place.

In 732 Charles Martel, in a defining battle, defeated the Muslim armies, forcing them back behind the mountains and confining them to the Iberian Peninsula. Had Martel lost that battle, Europe would have been a very different place. It

The nation provided a human with the things that are most human—language and a past that stretched back before his birth.

We have to remember that presidents are simply the street signs. The cycle is working itself out in the murky depths.

the idea that the past is obsolete is always resisted at an era's end.

In the course of the century, so many individual decisions are made that no single one of them is ever critical. Each decision is lost in the torrent of judgments that make up a century.

Empires always spawn demons,

Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith-a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will-but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world-faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.