Quotes About History

The late Ralf Dahrendorf, an Anglo-German political scientist well placed to appreciate the scale of the changes he had seen in his lifetime, wrote of those optimistic years that "[i]n many respects the social democratic consensus signifies the greatest progress which history has seen so far. Never before have so many people had so many life chances."12

Seen from the satellite countries, the Soviet version of recent history was palpably false; but for many Russians themselves it contained more than a grain of truth.

V následujících letech Izrael znehodnotí, podkopá a nakonec zni?í význam a využitelnost holokaustu a omezí jej na to, co v nÄ›m již dnes pÃ…â"¢iznanÄ› mnoho lidí vidí, totiž izraelskou výmluvu pro vlastní neblahé po?ínání.

However, there is something worse than idealizing the past—or presenting it to ourselves and our children as a chamber of horrors: forgetting it.

Unlike memory, which confirms and reinforces itself, history contributes to the disenchantment of the world. Most of what it has to offer is discomforting, even disruptive—which is why it is not always politically prudent to wield the past as a moral cudgel with which to beat and berate a people for its past sins.

A tak pokaždé, když nÄ›jaký trouba prohlásí, že Saddám Husajn je druhý Hitler, musíme se do sporu vložit a tyhle zjednoduÅ¡ující pitomosti zkomplikovat. RealitÄ› odpovídající zmatek je mnohem lepÅ¡í než elegantní nepravdy.

Schopnost evokovat Hitlera, OsvÄ›tim nebo Mnichov má své pÃ…â"¢ednosti: alespo? se tak sou?asnost dovolává minulosti, místo aby ji zcela ignorovala. Dnes to ?iníme amatérsky a stále více zp?sobem, kterým sami sobÄ› Å¡kodíme, ale aspo? to dÄ›láme. Nemáme se tÄ›chto aktivit vzdát, nýbrž provádÄ›t je s vyÅ¡Å¡í mírou historické informovanosti a vnímavosti.

the old ideological Left was part of the problem, not the solution. In

Communism was now forever to be associated with oppression, not revolution. For forty years the Western Left had looked to Russia, forgiving and even admiring Bolshevik violence as the price of revolutionary self-confidence and the march of History. Moscow was the flattering mirror of their political illusions. In November 1956, the mirror shattered.

World history is not the soil in which happiness grows. Periods of happiness are empty pages in it'. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The history and memory of the Second World War were typically confined to a familiar set of moral conventions: Good versus Evil, Anti-Fascists against Fascists, Resisters against Collaborators and so forth.

We should by now have learned that politics remains national, even if economics does not: the history of the 20th century offers copious evidence that even in healthy democracies, bad political choices usually trump 'rational' economic calculations.

Why, after decades of internal violence and foreign aggression, did the world's first Socialist society implode without even trying to defend itself? One answer, of course, is that it never really existed in the first place: that, in the words of the historian Martin Malia, 'there is no such thing as socialism, and the Soviet Union built

Nothing, of course, is ever quite as good as we remember. The social democratic consensus and the welfare institutions of the postwar decades coincided with some of the worst town planning and public housing of modern times. From Communist Poland through

All five were profoundly shaken by the interwar catastrophe that struck their native Austria.

But never again—and this was the true lesson of 1968, first for the Czechs but in due course for everyone else—never again would it be possible to maintain that Communism rested on popular consent, or the legitimacy of a reformed Party, or even the lessons of History.

re-surfaced.

Silence over Europe's recent past was the necessary condition for the construction of a European future. Today - in the wake of painful public debates in almost every other European country - it seems somehow fitting (and in any case unavoidable) that Germans, too, should at last feel able openly to question the canons of well intentioned official memory.

one were seeking a symbolic moment when this transformation was accomplished, a hinge on which post-war Europe's self-understanding turned, it came in Paris on December 28th 1973 with the first Western publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. Reviewing the English translation in the Guardian, W. L. Webb wrote 'To live now and not to know this work is to be a kind of historical fool, missing a crucial part of the consciousness of the age.

La Primera Guerra Mundial destruyó la vieja Europa; la Segunda Guerra Mundial generó las condiciones para una nueva.

This leveling process, whereby the native population of central and Eastern Europe took the place of the banished minorities, was Hitler's most enduring contribution to European social history.

And few can deny that welfarism, taken to extremes, carries a whiff of do as you're told!: there were moments in postwar Scandinavia when the enthusiasm for eugenics and social efficiency suggested not just a certain insensitivity to recent history but also to the natural human desire for autonomy and independence.

In Hungary, during the years 1948–53, about one million people (of a total population of less than ten million) are estimated to have suffered arrest, prosecution, imprisonment or deportation. One Hungarian family in three was directly affected.

It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.