Quotes About History

It is one of the great ironies of history that modern racism—probably the single greatest evil of our last two centuries—had to be invented largely because Europeans continued to refuse to listen to the arguments of the intellectuals and jurists and did not accept that anyone they believed to be a full and equal human being could ever be justifiably enslaved.

If history shows anything, it is that there's no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it's the victim who's doing something wrong.

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead of telling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state of equality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptual shackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility of reinventing ourselves?

Liberty grew because it served the interests of power. This apparent paradox was the core of Western identity.

This orbit defines another timescale that was hidden to us before the twentieth century: we complete one lap around our galaxy about every 225 million years.5 We can assemble a scrapbook of our cosmic history measured out in these galactic, or "cosmic," years. Our universe seems to have been around for about sixty-one of them,* and Earth has almost reached the galactic age of twenty-one. As a biosphere, we're still a teenager of sixteen or seventeen galactic years. We

early twentieth century seemed to see what was coming. In 1873, Italian geologist Antonio Stoppani proposed that the growing influence of humans was causing the "Anthropozoic era," but this was largely ignored by scientists of his day. In 1877, physiologist Joseph LeConte described a similar concept, calling it the Psychozoic era. In the 1920s the French Jesuit priest Tielhard de Chardin spoke of

Around six thousand to seven thousand years ago, sea level stabilized after a multithousand-year period of rapid rise. The first large coastal settlements on several continents all date to this period. The high-protein fish diets made possible by stable sea level and consequent coastal settlement contributed to the rise of complex societies around the world. In

For him, the Holocaust was a laboratory gone mad, accelerating and intensifying human processes a hundredfold...

Look on the bright side. Even though America's Wokey-Woke police cannot issue arrest warrants for real or imagined transgressors from the pages of history, they still have the New York Times willing to do a little front-page strangling on their behalf.

Roll-over Carthage and Babylon! With the auspicious embarrassment that only great nations can achieve, America's twenty-first century that began with that Holy Trinity of turdsqueak popcorn farts; George W. Bush, Barack Hussein Obama and Donald Trump, is now being awarded an involuntary colonoscopy without an anesthesia by Comatose Joe Biden and his assistant, Willie Brown's second or third string wifey, Camilla Harris.

Judaism: A Modern Movement with an Ancient Past

The purpose of life and the meaning of history is that God will deliver humanity from the misery of sin and restore the conditions that enable individuals and peoples to relate rightly with him. Morality and happiness are inseparably linked with salvation.

Until Washington crossed the Delaware, the triumph of the old order seemed inevitable. Thereafter, things would never be the same again.

threatened. As late as 1775, townsmen within twenty miles of the sea were urged to carry arms to church lest godless British raiding parties surprise them while at worship. After the service, the men left the meeting first—a regional folkway that continued long after its military origins had been forgotten.

One of the few points of agreement between Anglican Virginians and Puritan New Englanders was their common loathing of Quakers.

Shame had an emotional power which it has lost today.

Not a single ex-servant or son of a servant became a member of Virginia's House of Burgesses during the late seventeenth century.

Of all the English-speaking people in the seventeenth century, the Quakers moved farthest toward the idea of equality between the sexes.

The history of censorship in twentieth-century America is largely a story of self-regulation in the name of self-preservation—voluntary restraint enacted on the assumption that governmental restriction would be worse.

When the Associated Press picked up the story from local accounts, readers of The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and dozens of other papers around the country learned how, just three years after the Second World War, American citizens were burning books.

I would do a book about how and why we had gone to war in Vietnam, and about the men who were the architects of the war. The basic question behind the book was why men who were said to be the ablest to serve in government in this century had been the architects of what struck me as likely to be the worst tragedy since the Civil War.

Because history became his (Keenan's) genuine passion, he tended to see the world in terms of deep historical forces that, in his mind, formed a nation's character in ways almost beyond the consciousness of the men who momentarily governed it, as if these historical impulses were more a part of them than they knew.

had come all this way and this was what I get paid to do. So I went out and found his home and for four hours it all poured out, what had happened in those three days at Chipyongni when he was a young platoon leader. It was if he had been waiting for me to come by for fifty-five years, and he remembered everything as

The Tydings Committee eventually criticized McCarthy for his behavior and exonerated most of those attacked by him. McCarthy's accusations, it reported, "represented perhaps the most nefarious campaign of half-truths and untruths in the history of the Republic.