Quotes About History

The wars of Israel were the only 'holy wars' in history... there can be no more wars of faith. The only way to overcome our enemy is by loving him.

It is in fact more important for us to know what God did to Israel, to His Son Jesus Christ, than to seek what God intends for us today.

Luther's return from the cloister to the world was the worst blow the world had suffered since the days of early Christianity.

It is a question of the freedom of God, which finds its strongest evidence precisely in that God freely chose to be bound to historical human beings and to be placed at the disposal of human beings. God is not from human beings but for them.

Ratio became a working hypothesis, a heuristic principle, and thus led to the incomparable rise of technology. This was something fundamentally new in world history. From the Egyptian pyramids to the Greek temples, from the medieval cathedrals up to the eighteenth century, technology was a matter of handicraft. It served religion, royalty, culture, and people's daily needs.

Our salvation is 'external to ourselves'. I find no salvation in my life history, but only in the history of Jesus Christ. Only he who allows himself to be found in Jesus Christ, in his incarnation, his Cross, and his resurrection, is with God and God with him.

The immanent righteousness of history rewards and punishes only men's deeds, but the eternal righteousness of God tries and judges their hearts.

The form of the crucified disarms all thinking aimed at success, for it is a denial of judgment. Neither the triumph of the successful, nor bitter hatred of the successful by those who fail, can finally cope with the world. Jesus is certainly no advocate for the successful in history, but neither does he lead the revolt of the failures [gescheiterte Existenzen][58.] against the successful.

Through the life and death of Jesus Christ, history becomes not the transient bearer of eternal values but, for the first time, thoroughly temporal.

But because Christ is both the incarnate and the crucified, and wills to be recognized as both equally, the proper reception of the historical heritage of antiquity is still an open task for the West.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a great realist. He was one of the few who quickly understood, even before Hitler came to power, that National Socialism was a brutal attempt to make history without God and to found it on the strength of man alone.

The Roman church's unmistakable claim is that there is only one church and only one faith and that Christendom needs a visible head, a chief shepherd, to guide the church and to care for the faithful with fatherly care. The longing for a lost Western empire, longing for the corpus christianum in which emperor and pope together are guardians of the unity of the Christian West, cannot fade away as long as there is a papacy.

To talk of going down fighting like heroes in the face of certain defeat is not really heroic at all, but merely a refusal to face the future. The ultimate question for a responsible man to ask is not how he is to extricate himself heroically from the affair, but how the coming generation is to live. It is only from this question, with its responsibility towards history, that fruitful solutions can come, even if for the time being they are very humiliating.

When asked about the extent to which the British decision to quit India was influenced by Mahatma Gandhi's 1942 movement, Attlee's lips widened in smile of disdain and he uttered, slowly, "Minimal."5

daguerreotype

Leading Democrats founded the Ku Klux Klan in the late nineteenth century and then, after Republicans shut it down, revived it in the early twentieth century.

Today the left continues with this project of concealment. It doesn't want people—especially young people—to know the role of the Democrats in protecting slavery and advancing racism.

If you look at a map, you will see that the country of Italy is shaped like a boot, and that the island of Sicily appears to be something that Italy is kicking. What do you think Sicily has done to annoy Italy?

Superstition has been defined as the use of a form whose significance has been forgotten.

Some say these people were Phoenicians, but that is incorrect; they were older than the Phoenicians being Atlanteans,

The smell of hurrying passed my nostrils with the smell of sea water and fresh fish wind, there was history which had taught my eyes to look for escape even beneath the almond leaves fat as women, the conch shell tiny as sand, the rock stone old like water. I learned to read this from a woman whose hand trembled at the past, then even being born to her was temporary, wet and thrown half dressed among the dozens ofbrown legs itching to run.

The ric rac running ofyour story remains braided in other wars, Liney, no one is interested in telling thetruth. History will only hear you if you give birth to a woman who smoothes starched linen in the wardrobe drawer, trembles when she walks and who gives birth to another woman who cries near a river and vanishes and who gives birth to a woman who is a poet, and, even then.

Having no name to call on was having no past; having no past pointed to the fissure between the past and the present. That fissure is represented in the Door of No Return: that place where our ancestors departed one world for another; the Old World for the New. The place where all names were forgotten and all beginnings recast.

Nothing happened here. Nothing extraordinary for its time. Two nuns held slaves like any priest or explorer or settler in the New World. It is the others, the ones they held, who keep the memory, who imagine over and over again where they might be. It is they who keep these details alive and raw like yesterday. They twist and turn in all imaginations to come, in plain sight or in disguise. This fragile place and its muscular dreams. Nothing really happened here