Quotes About History

el Ejército Rojo había liberado el campo de concentración de Sachsenhausen

We're paying for the easy choices German men made fifteen years ago. Men such as my father, who thought Hitler would be good for business, and Heinrich's father, who voted for the Enabling Act. The sins of the fathers are visited on the daughters.

peaceful men and women whose only crime is to disagree with the government. Does this sound fantastic to you, unlikely, something that could never happen? Well, they used exactly those tactics in Germany—and it worked.

It was the most romantic plane ever made.

Students were expected to learn hundreds of lines from the Greek and Roman classics, then, later, from poetry in their native tongues. This tradition has faded from our lives, and something powerful has been lost.

There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.

And so now, today, one cannot think of the greats—Kant, Hegel, Spinoza, Marx, Fichte, Freud, Nietzsche, Einstein, Schopenhauer, Leibniz, Schelling—the whole Germanic sphere—without thinking, at some point, of Auschwitz and Treblinka, Sobibor and Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Chelmno. My God, they have names, as if they were human.

starting with the Renaissance and running through the Enlightenment, there occurred what we might call "the great reversal." Suddenly, very suddenly, the Ascenders were out, the Descenders were in—and the transition was bloody, arguably the bloodiest cognitive transformation in European history.

Power without responsibility - the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.

We have no intention of ignoring or appeasing history's latest gang of fanatics trying to murder their way to power.

There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power.

The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.

Socialism, like Christianity destroyed itself to gain power

Ideas are, in truth, forces. Infinite, too, is the power of personality. A union of the two always makes history.

The worst thing about being a great power is when you're not one any more. It takes centuries to get over it.

Speeches pass away, but acts remain.

I think if someone else other than Reagan, someone less of a hardliner, had been in power then the breakthrough in ending the Cold War would not have happened.

The church has no power over our lives any more, which is something of a blessing for those who do not enjoy red-hot pokers or iron thumb-screws.

By the numbers, by all the official records, here at the confluence of history, of racism, of poverty, and economic power, this is what our lives are worth: nothing.

I often say of George Washington that he was one of the few in the whole history of the world who was not carried away by power.

I admired Hitler, for instance, because he came from being a little man with almost no formal education, up to power. I admire him for being such a good public speaker and for what he did with it.

The story of Jesus is very fascinating. It still has such a tremendous power, even after 2,000 years! We don't really know if he existed as a historical figure.

Nuclear power will be the Vietnam issue of the 1980s.

The power of narrative sort of defines something forever and ever.