Quotes About History

Druk, odbicie, to w istocie wg??bienie uzyskane za pomoc? nacisku; dzieje drukarstwa, to historia zanikania tych wg??bie?.

More history than ever is today being revised or invented by people who do not want the real past, but only a past that suits their purpose. Today is the great age of historical mythology. The defence of history by its professionals is today more urgent in politics than ever. We are needed.

destruction of the past, or rather the social mechanisms that link one's contemporary experience to that of earlier generations, is one of the most characteristic and eerie phenomena of the late twentieth century. Most young men and women at the century's end grow up in a permanent present lacking any organic relation to the public past of the times in which they live

O domínio do passado não implica em uma imagem de imobilidade social. É compatível com visões cíclicas de mudança histórica, e certamente com a regressão e a catástrofe (ou seja, o fracasso em reproduzir o passado). É incompatível com a ideia de progesso contínuo.

The periodic famines, the burden of labour which made men old at forty and women at thirty, were acts of God; they only became acts for which men were held responsible in times of abnormal hardship or revolution.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle. The reason that the inferior elements of a nation can exert a marked influence on its course is that they are wholly without reverence toward the present. They see their lives and the present as spoiled beyond remedy and they are ready to waste and wreck both: hence their recklessness and their will to chaos and anarchy.

Most often in history it was the conquerors who learned willingly from the conquered.

A nation's preoccupation with history is not infrequently an effort to obtain a passport for the future. Often it is a forged passport.

new poor coming from a ruined middle class formed the chief support of the Nazi and Fascist revolutions.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish, the Holocaust will be upon us.

there are men who regret that we cannot hear our Handel exactly as Handel meant us to because, unfortunately, we no longer castrate boy singers

Though the web of history cannot be unravelled into separate threads without destroying it, a certain amount of subdivision of the subject is, for practical purposes, essential.

En términos morales, los imperios siempre se han justificado a sí mismos, y en ocaciones no sin una cierta sinceridad, tanto cuando afirmaban que llevaban (su versión de) civilización o la religión a unos pueblos sumidos en la ignorancia, como cuando decían llevar (su versión de) la libertad a los oprimidos (por otro imperio) o, en la actualidad, cuando se presentan como los campeones de los derechos humanos.

History does not consult the convenience of historians, though some of them are not always aware of it.

For all invented traditions, so far as possible, use history as a legitimator of action and cement of group cohesion.

Aunque el ideal terrenal del socialismo y el comunismo se haya derrumbado, los problemas que este ideal intentaba resolver permanecen: se trata de la descarada utilización social del desmesurado poder del dinero, que muchas veces dirige el curso de los acontecimientos. Y si la lección global del siglo XX no produce una seria reflexión, el inmerso torbellino rojo puede repetirse de principio a fin. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, en New York Times 28 de noviembre de 1993

No sabemos a dónde vamos, sino tan sólo que la historia nos ha llevado hasta este punto y -si los lectores comparten el planteamiento de este libro- por qué. Sin embargo, una cosa está clara: si la humanidad ha de tener un futuro, no será prolongando el pasado o el presente. Si intentamos construir el tercer milenio sobre estas bases, fracasaremos. Y el precio del fracaso, esto es, la alternativa a una sociedad transformada, es la oscuridad

Talvez valha a pena lembrar que nesse período a ameaça às instituições liberais vinha apenas da direita política, já que entre 1945 e 1989 se supôs, quase como coisa indiscutível, que vinha essencialmente do comunismo.

The black man has been manipulated by the offspring of the evil bastards who kidnapped and enslaved his forefathers. A black man using the white man's Bible is the best example of Stockholm syndrome to date. If blacks are in a white man's heaven, they are janitors and maids.

Women ignore history. Always think it will be different for them.

Which is why, from the Inca Empire to the Soviet Union, extractive societies have been prone to collapse. Power naturally flows to the top. We've established that. But where power flows to the top and stays there, without correction or recirculation, a society is likely to die a catastrophic death.

One historian has described the federal government's 1950s highway-building binge as a case study in "interstate socialism"—

Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea.