Quotes About History

What if I told you that we know exactly who shot JFK from the grassy knoll, that the foreknowledge of Pearl Harbor was proven in court, that the CO2 greenhouse effect is scientifically absurd, that our money is created through loans by banks who don't even have the funds, or that science proves with a 100% certainty that 911 was an inside job?

We are so accustomed to thinking of European civilization as the vanguard of the world that we forget that for much of human history, the European peninsula was at the receiving end of the miracles of the East. Over the millennia, innovations such as Mesopotamian agriculture, the Phoenician alphabet, Greek philosophy, and Arab bookkeeping all flowed from east to west. Both Christianity and Islam followed the same route. So did wheat, olives, sugar, and spices.

Tacitus informs us for example that after murdering his wife Poppaea in 65 AD, Nero used a year's supply of Rome's cinnamon to bury her.

Leonard Ravenhill: The prophet is violated during his ministry, but he is vindicated by history. He is the villain of today and the hero of tomorrow. He is excommunicated while alive and exalted when dead! He is dishonored with epithets when breathing and honored with epitaphs when dead. He is friendless while living and famous when dead. He is against the establishment in ministry; then he is established as a saint by posterity.1

Christianity did not create the Holocaust—indeed, Nazism was anti-Christian—but it made it possible. Without Christian antisemitism, the Holocaust would have been inconceivable.…

Strauss's later judgment on the Kantian-Cohenian idea of ethical socialism was dispositive: Cohen's thought belongs to the world preceding World War I. Accordingly, he had a greater faith in the power of modern Western culture to mold the fate of mankind than seems warranted now. The worst things he had experienced were the Dreyfus scandal and the pogroms instigated by Czarist Russia; he did not experience Communist Russia and Hitler's Germany.

In essence, all of this fills out the gap left in God's Presence in History between the identification of the imperative to respond to Auschwitz and the formulation of it as a 614th commandment, with its ramified content.

He wrote about this claim, that the evils of Auschwitz could not be assimilated into the Hegelian system and hence by implication by any philosophical thought and indeed by any thought at all, briefly in his book The Religious Dimension of Hegel's Thought, published in 1968, and then again in an essay, "Would Hegel Today Be a Hegelian?

Everything, in retrospect, is obvious. But if everything were obvious, authors of histories of financial folly would be rich . . .

The American system of education, in its incipiency, and for a long while, was one founded on Bible-teaching and religious exercises. The present system is un-American, anti-American.

This undermines a central tenet of progressivism, that now we're all smart but before everyone used to be dumb (how convenient for us!).

As the motto went, "Communism is 20th century Americanism.

The fact is that the Communists are the forerunners of fascism," she wrote in 1933. "Neither Mussolini nor Hitler have made a single original step. All they had to do is follow and copy faithfully the steps taken by Lenin and Stalin.

After all, the past is our only real guide to the future, and historical analogies are instruments for distilling and organizing the past and converting it to a map by which we can navigate.

we make the mistake of viewing history through modern eyes. Instead, it must be evaluated with an open mind. We must take into account the fears and superstitions of the times, for they are critical to understanding the people and their motivations.

I also believed that the Snowden affair marked the end of one of the most confrontational periods in U.S.-Russian history. I thought then that we had hit the bottom and therefore there was nowhere to go but up, though it would take years to climb out of the hole we were in. I was wrong. Things could, and did, get worse.

Soon thereafter, Tom asked me to write up dozens of one- to two-page case studies of transitions from authoritarian rule over the last fifty years,

History shows that democracies rarely go to war with each other.6 So a democratic Russia would no longer be an enemy of the United States. A

In mythic terms, the earth is a place of mystery and wonder where life always hangs by a thread and all the events of history are loosely stitched upon the endless loom of eternity. Secretly, we are each tied to the divine.

In mythic terms, the earth is a place of mystery and wonder where life always hangs by a thread and all the events of history are loosely stitched upon the endless loom of eternity. Secretly, we are each tied to the divine. Human awareness was thought to be the extra element in creation, able at times to help tip the scales toward renewal.

Harvard historian Crane Brinton (The Anatomy of Revolution) pointed out that revolutionary sentiments generally develop in periods of long-term economic progress, not abject deprivation. When business produces a sharp increase in living standards, the 'revolution of rising expectations' leaves workers and farmers impatient for more rapid advancement.

the English colonies in North America accounted for only a tiny fraction of the hideous traffic in human beings. David Brion Davis, in his magisterial 2006 history Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World, concludes that colonial North America 'surprisingly received only 5 to 6 percent of the African slaves shipped across the Atlantic.' Hugh Thomas in The Slave Trade calculates the percentage as slightly lower, at 4.4 percent.

Legends are best left as legends and attempts to make them real are rarely successful

It's History that's caused all the troubles in the past.