Quotes About History

But they praise any culture so long as it is not Western solely and simply in order to denigrate and devalue the West. As a result, they reach their final end argument, which is to demand why anyone should admire or wish to continue a civilization that has done so much wrong and had such bigotry and hatred built in throughout its history.

If it is agreed that everybody did bad things in the past, then it is possible to move on and even to move beyond it. Who wants to litigate a past in which nobody's ancestors were saints? Some people do, and they have decided that they can do so by re-framing the history of slavery through their own specifically anti-Western lens.

the place of a history or tradition, we got instead the talk of "values" only, as though those values came from nowhere or could be invented afresh. In the name of great openness, we became close-minded, and in the name of progress, we absorbed ideas that turned out to be highly regressive.

With regard to women's rights and sexual-minority rights, and, of course, in particular when it came to the issue of racism, everything was presented as though it had never been worse at the point at which it had never been better.

At the heart of which attitude lies the strange retributive instinct of our time towards the past which suggests that we know ourselves to be better than people in history because we know how they behaved and we know that we would have behaved better. There is a gigantic modern fallacy at work here.

The millions and millions of corpses, the wasted lives that communism left behind as testament to its main accomplishment, were enough to give any sane believer pause. There were some true believers left, like the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, but the world generally reacted to them with the incredulity deserved for a person standing on top of a pile of corpses promising that with just a few more deaths he could make the whole thing right.

If Australia is forever opening up and apologising for its own past while China remains silent, the impression may eventually be instilled, in children in Australia as much as anywhere else, that Australia is the country with more to apologise for.

America, as in Australia, such a constant drumbeat of guilt changes a people's natural feelings about their own past. It transforms feelings of patriotism into shame or at the very least into deeply mixed emotions, and troubling effects result from this. A country that believes it has never done any wrong is a country that could do wrong at any time.

People imbibe it because they like it: they get high on it. It lifts them up and exalts them. Rather than being people responsible for themselves and answerable to those they know, they become the self-appointed representatives of the living and dead, the bearers of a terrible history as well as the potential redeemers of mankind.

Only the nations of Europe and their descendants allow themselves to be judged by their lowest moments.

So at the 'Women's March' in London in January 2018 one of the placards waved by a young woman with pink hair read 'No Country for Old White Men'.59 One irony was that one of the Socialist Worker banners beside her read 'No to racism'. The sadness was that the young woman was waving her placard just beside the Cenotaph, which admittedly commemorates a lot of white men, but white men who never had a chance to grow old.

A succession of philosophers and historians spent their time studiously attempting to say nothing as successfully as possible.

Internet nos ayuda a recordar, pero también nos lleva a abordar el pasado desde una extraña omnisciencia. Esto convierte al pasado -como todo lo demás- en rehén de cualquier arqueólogo con sed de venganza.

Many of the claims made in French's book are tendentious and ahistorical. Once she has set up her paradigm she is able to make almost anything fit into it. But it is the dichotomy she insists on throughout which is most striking. Everything that is good is female. Everything that is bad is male.

Water is life. It is one of the earth's greatest resources. History is well documented on the ways of water. Wars have been fought over it, societies have risen up, societies have been removed, all throughout the annals of time.

People need history in order to know themselves, to build a sense of identity and pride, continuity, community, and hope for the future.

Once a line could truly be drawn in something other than sand, the notion of history as a progression became possible.

Cascadia was able to exist for so long as a single entity because no nation cared enough to take control of this distant corner of North America. Even though four countries — Russia, Spain, Britain and the United States — explored the Pacific Northwest's coastline, none claimed exclusive sovereignty over the land mass lying behind it.

The world is a very different place from what it was two thousand years ago, much of it for the better, but we are still taking the lives of inconvenient infants. The work that Jesus came to do, that of throwing down all the idols, is not yet complete.

if we do not tell our stories faithfully, they will gradually change over time until they become quite unrecognizable. With a story like this—one that has in the minds of many supplanted the story of the Christ child—we have to remember that St. Nicholas probably would have slugged somebody over it.

When it comes to the history of ideas, it is relatively simple to show that religious toleration, which includes tolerating verbal expressions of ideas repugnant to you, is an idea that germinated in Christian soil. In Christian history, we see it as early as Lactantius (an early church father who tutored Constantine's kids), and it comes to full bloom in the American Bill of Rights. Letting other people express their errors without fear of reprisal is a distinctively Christian ideal.

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

And as the history of the church revealed in Acts shows, their central debate was over whether or not the Gentiles had to include their children in the New Covenant by means of circumcision—their debate was not whether the Jewish Christians had to start excluding their children.

Objectivity is a false god, and the worship of this idol is particularly pernicious in disciplines like journalism and history. It is not possible to be objective----although of course it is possible to be honest. By pretending to attain to objectivity, a writer's fundamental faith commitments are not eliminated, but rather submerged----and they then come out in interesting and intellectually dishonest ways.