Quotes About History

And history teaches this iron law of revolutions: the more extensive the eradication of existing authority, the more its successors must rely on naked power to establish themselves. For,in the end,legitimacy involves an acceptance of authority without compulsion; its absence turns every contest into a test of strength.

postcolonial" countries. All have sought to overcome the legacy of colonial

A Harvard study has shown that in fifteen cases in history where a rising and an established power interacted, ten ended in war.

If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president's first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.

Konrad Adenauer became Chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany at the age of seventy-three, an age by which Bismarck's career was nearing its end.

Historically, alliances had been formed to augment a nation's strength in case of war; as World War I approached, the primary motive for war was to strengthen the alliances.

interrelated. In contrast to the Western approach of treating history as a process of modernity achieving a series of absolute victories over evil and backwardness, the traditional Chinese view of history emphasized a cyclical process of decay and rectification, in which nature and the world can be understood but not completely mastered.

The two sides need to absorb the history of the decade before World War I, when the gradual emergence of an atmosphere of suspicion and latent confrontation escalated into catastrophe. The leaders of Europe trapped themselves by their military planning and inability to separate the tactical from the strategic.

At least Tsar Alexander III understood that the game now being played was for the highest stakes. When Giers asked him, '...what would we gain by helping the french destroy Germany?' he replied: 'what we would gain would be that Germany, as such, would disappear. It would break up into a number of small, weak states, the way it used to be'.

For nations, history plays the role that character confers on human beings.

The tragedy of Wilsonianism is that it bequeathed to the twentieth century's decisive power an elevated foreign policy doctrine unmoored from a sense of history or geopolitics.

Tradition matters because it is not given to societies to proceed through history as if they had no past and as if every course of action were available to them. they may deviate from the previous trajectory only within a finite margin. the great statesmen act at the outer limit of that margin. if they fall short, society stagnates. if they exceed it, they lose the capacity to shape posterity.

The United States has every reason from history and geopolitics to bolster the European Union and prevent its drifting off into a geopolitical vacuum; the United States, if separated from Europe in politics, economics, and defense, would become geopolitically an island off the shores of Eurasia, and Europe itself could turn into an appendage to the reaches of Asia and the Middle East.

Spanish territory in Florida and Texas—the

If history teaches anything it is that there can be no peace without equilibrium and no justice without restraint.

China produced no religious themes in the Western sense at all. The Chinese never generated a myth of cosmic creation.

were history confined to the mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever have occurred. Every great achievement was a vision before it became a reality. In that sense, it arose from commitment, not resignation to the inevitable.

Não fizeram qualquer esforço para incluir a vizinha Rússia, que na época, findo o pesadelo de um «tempo de dificuldades», reconstruía a sua própria ordem consagrando princípios em clara contradição com o equilíbrio vestefaliano: um único soberano absoluto, uma ortodoxia religiosa unificada, e um programa de expansão territorial em todas as direções.

To understand a man,' Napoleon is said to have observed, 'look at the world when he was twenty.' Thatcher had turned twenty in 1945.

Sin embargo, en los primeros años de la dinastía Ming, entre 1405 y 1433, China abordó una de las empresas navales más notables y misteriosas de toda la historia: el almirante Zheng He emprendió viaje con unas flotas compuestas por «barcos del tesoro», tecnológicamente sin precedentes, hacia lejanos destinos como Java, la India, el Cuerno de África y el estrecho de Ormuz.

Letting Stalin lead Mao into authorizing the Korean War was the only strategic mistake Mao ever made because, in the end, the Korean War delayed Chinese unification by a century in that it led to America's commitment to Taiwan.

Every age has its leitmotif, a set of beliefs that explains the universe, that inspires or consoles the individual by providing an explanation for the multiplicity of events impinging on him. In the medieval period, it was religion; in the Enlightenment, it was Reason; in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was nationalism combined with a view of history as a motivating force. Science and technology are the governing concepts of our age.

Rakousko, kdysi považované za jednu z nejsilnÄ›jÅ¡ích a nejlépe Ã…â"¢ízených zemí v EvropÄ›, se stalo zranitelným vlivem své polohy uprostÃ…â"¢ed Evropy: kdykoli se kontinent zatÃ…â"¢ásl, dolehla sem odezva. Mnohojazy?ný ráz Ã…â"¢íÅ¡e ji též ?inil snadným ter?em sílící vlny nacionalismu, síly, která byla jeÅ¡tÄ› o generaci dÃ…â"¢íve v podstatÄ› neznámá.

Snad žádná domácí diskuse v amerických dÄ›jinách nezanechala tak hluboké rány jako spory kolem války ve Vietnamu.