Quotes About History

History is never the simple recounting of the past as it really was. It is inevitably an interpretation of the past, a retrospective vision of the past, which is limited both by the sources themselves and by the historian who selects and interprets them.

We know so little of the universe, yet the universe knows all about us and all humans that have lived on Earth. It has seen the birth of life and the evolution of Man. It has witnessed our history and will probably view our demise, like a hidden camera that has filmed our lives.

Think about it: If there is a Creator who knows us and cares about how we live, then our lives should be profoundly affected. If there is a "history of the uni- verse"-and if we have a personal "history" that continues after the termination of our earthly existence-then this experience we call "life" should take on a totally different meaning, far different than just surviving on earth for as long as and in the most luxurious fashion possible.

We were thinking far-out history thoughts at Harvard...believing that it was a time for visions, knowing that America had run out of philosophy, that a new empirical, tangible meta-physics was needed.

The unutterable violence of the Holocaust shook our confidence in the possibility of telling any story of faith at all.

Some scholars claim that over 250,000 people were put to death for the crime of Witchcraft during the "burning times" in Europe, while others say the number reached as high as nine million.

Post-truth is pre-fascism.

The history of the Holocaust is not over. Its precedent is eternal, and its lessons have not yet been learned.

History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.

Russians who voted in 1990 did not think that this would be the last free and fair election in their country's history, which (thus far) it has been.

We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy...We imbibed the myth of an "end of history". In doing so, we lowered our defences, constrained our imagination, and opened the way for precisely the kinds of regimes we told ourselves could never return.

History as a discipline began as a confrontation with war propaganda. In the first history book, The Peloponnesian Wars , Thucydides was careful to make a distinction between leaders' accounts of their actions and the real reasons for their decisions.

What would have happened if Poland, rather than the Soviet Union, had accepted Joachim von Ribbentrop's proposals in 1939? Would the Soviet Union have withstood an invasion of Germany allied with Poland and, perhaps, Romania and Hungary as well? That Germany and Poland did not make an alliance, and that Germany and the Soviet Union did, is perhaps the single crucial fact about the war.

Separated from National Socialism by time and luck, we find it easy to dismiss Nazi ideas without contemplating how they functioned. Our forgetfulness convinces us that we are different from Nazis by shrouding the ways that we are the same. —

Between July 1942 and June 1943, only 4,705 Jews were admitted to the United States—fewer than the number of Warsaw Jews who were killed on a given day at Treblinka in summer 1942.

In a new Russian colonialism that began in 2013, Russian leaders and propagandists imagined neighboring Ukrainians out of existence or presented them as sub-Russians. In characterizations that recall what Hitler said about Ukrainians (and Russians), Russian leaders described Ukraine as an artificial entity with no history, culture, and language, backed by some global agglomeration of Jews, gays, Europeans, and Americans. In

Who," asked Hitler, "remembers the Red Indians?" For Hitler, Africa was the source of the imperial references but not the actual site of empire; eastern Europe was that actual site, and it was to be remade just as North America had been remade.

the democracies that arose after the First World War (and the Second) often collapsed when a single party seized power in some combination of an election and a coup d'état. A

Jewish resistance in Warsaw was not only about the dignity of the Jews but about the dignity of humanity as such, including those of the Poles, the British, the Americans, the Soviets: of everyone who could have done more, and instead did less.30

During the years that both Stalin and Hitler were in power, more people were killed in Ukraine than anywhere else in the bloodlands, or in Europe, or in the world.

The seemingly distant traumas of fascism, Nazism, and communism seemed to be receding into irrelevance. We allowed ourselves to accept the politics of inevitability, the sense that history could move in only one direction: toward liberal democracy.

The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns in their hands. It would serve us well today to understand why.

Our intuitions fail us. We rightly associate the Holocaust with Nazi ideology, but forget that many of the killers were not Nazis or even Germans. We think first of German Jews, although almost all of the Jews killed in the Holocaust lived beyond Germany. We

We might be tempted to think that our democratic heritage automatically protects us from such threats. This is a misguided reflex. Our own tradition demands that we examine history to understand the deep sources of tyranny, and to consider the proper responses to it. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism in the twentieth century. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. Now is a good time to do so.