Quotes About History

The Song of the Germans

They loved and reviled Hitler like no other twentieth-century politician.

Berlin Stays Red

Reich chancellor!

Erich Ebermayer joked that the government "would last until after the next lost war.

But we were Germans; the gangsters who had taken control of the country were not Germany—we were.

THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME will always be controversial.

The casualties were beyond comprehension with 57,470 British casualties on the first day alone. Of these a staggering 19,240 were killed.

The words of history are also the words of war.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

That war had almost torn the country in two, but the railroad, men said, had bound it back together, the tracks and ties like sutures to a wound, now fading to a scar.

Without question, the most famous book ever written about angling is The Compleat Angler published by Izaak Walton in 1653. Since

Argumentation is a human enterprise that is embedded in a larger social and psychological context. This context includes (1) the total psyches of the two persons engaged in dialogue, (2) the relationship between the two persons, (3) the immediate situation in which they find themselves and (4) the larger social, cultural and historical situation surrounding them.

Only Judaism and Christianity are religions of public record, eyewitnessed facts.

We make a big deal out of Christmas; we should make an even bigger deal out of March 25. The greatest event in history, the Incarnation, happened at the Annunciation, not the Nativity.

Christ changed every human being he ever met. In fact, He changed history, splitting it open like a coconut and inserting eternity into the split between B.C. and A.D. If anyone claims to have met Him without being changed, he has not met Him at all. When you touch Him, you touch lightning. Socrates is puzzled because he is looking for the burn marks.

The ancient Greeks named about five hundred gods, the Romans five thousand, the Tibetan Buddhists nine million, but Americans are the most polytheistic people in history: they have named 330 million gods. That is the root of our insanity. We demand to be our own authorities because we demand to be the authors of our own being and meaning

Judaism, the one and only directly and divinely revealed religion in the world

I really was put out of Germany for the crime of blasphemy... My offense was to think that Hitler is just an ordinary man

If the world is going to be regarded as a continual hunting, fishing and fighting expedition," said Dorothy, "— if it is to be regarded in terms of the primitive male activities — then it will go on as it has gone on, with booms, depressions, and wars... It's going to be Caesars and World Wars throughout a long future

We are prisoners of the future because we will be ensnared by our past.

The cross is the crux, the crossroads, the twisted knot at the center of reality, to which all previous history leads and from which all subsequent history flows. By it we know all reality is cruciform—the love of God, the shape of creation, the labyrinth of human history.

Literature in the West arose from liturgy.

I believe we find imaginative satisfaction in stories that end with weddings because we live in a world that will end with a wedding. The Bible tells the story of history, a story that is mysteriously 'built into' the structure of our minds and practices, so that even writers who resist this story cannot help but leave traces of it—faint and distorted as they may be—on every page.