Quotes About History

Everyone is sure they know what fascism is.

Junior partnerships within authoritarian regimes proved disastrous for fascist movements. Playing second fiddle fit badly with fascists' extravagant claims to transform their peoples and redirect history. For their part, the authoritarian senior partners took a dim view of the fascists' impatient violence and disdain for established interests, for these cases often involved fascist movements that retained much of the social radicalism of the early movement stage.

Also perversely awe-inspiring is the fact that a person of Bechamp's extraordinary accomplishments has been written out of history books, textbooks and all encyclopedias.

they were Muslims who had a long history not unlike Christian history—namely, marching into countries where a bunch of folks thought differently than you about life and God and you ground your righteous heel into their throats. I was an infidel. But not inside here. In this house—and on the most threadbare couch in the most desolate, rubble-strewn vacant lot—coffee and tobacco were the common sacraments of the whole human race.

Illegal aliens have always been a problem in the United States. Ask any Indian.

But if we white Christians are going to get any critical leverage on our past, and the distortions this past has brought into our present, we have to let go of both the quest for self-protection—that is to say, the advantages we hoard at unjust costs to others—and the insistence on our racial and religious innocence.

white Christian convictions about the evils of slavery more often than not failed to translate into strong commitments to black equality.

White Christianity has been many things for America. But whatever else it has been -- and the country is indebted to it for a good many things--it has also been the primary institution legitimizing and propagating white power and dominance.

The Christian denomination in which I grew up was founded on the proposition that slavery could flourish alongside the gospel of Jesus Christ. Its founders believed that this arrangement was not just possible, but divinely mandated.

No segment of White Christian America has been more complicit in the nation's fraught racial history than white evangelical Protestants.

The unsettling truth is that, for nearly all of American history, the Jesus conjured by most white congregations was not merely indifferent to the status quo of racial inequality; he demanded its defense and preservation as part of the natural, divinely ordained order of things.

it is white Americans who have murdered our black and brown brothers and sisters. After the genocide and forced removal of Native Americans, the enslavement of millions of Africans, and the lynching of more than 4,400 of their surviving descendants, it is white Americans who have used our faith as a shield to justify our actions, deny our responsibility, and insist on our innocence. We, white Christian Americans, are Cain.

it wasn't until the last two decades of the twentieth century that white Baptist historians directly faced up to the proslavery, white supremacist origins of their denomination. Robert Baker, a professor at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary through the first half of the twentieth century, acknowledged that "the involvement of the South in the 'peculiar institution

The historical witness is clear: as confederate symbols migrated from cemeteries and veterans' parades, they became less about honoring the past and more about upholding white supremacy in the present. In fact, the relationship is inversely proportional. The further the distance from the cemetery and the past, the more nakedly obvious their role in asserting white supremacy becomes.

the U.S. Census Bureau has not asked about religious affiliation since 1946

White Christian America had its golden age in the 1950s, after the hardships and victories of World War Ii and before the cultural upheavals of the 1960s. June Cleaver was its mother, Andy Griffith was its sheriff, Norman Rockwell was its artist. and Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale were its ministers.

A look at the past reminds us of how great is the distance, and how short, over which we have come. The past makes us ask what we have done with us. It makes us ask whether our very achievements are not ironical counterpoint and contrast to our fundamental failures.

Reality is not a function of the event as event, but of the relationship of that event to past, and future, events.

The lack of a sense of history is the damnation of the modern world.

Walls, no less than writing, define civilization. They are monuments of resistance against time, like writing itself. . .

Calm down please, sir, if you will,' said the bobby, still retaining a firm hold upon the horse's reins. ' "Stolen" is such an ugly word. It is not technically stealing if you are a British archaeologist and you acquire items of historical significance in the savage realms and liberate them to civilisation.

I know little of the Catholic faith,' said Pooley, 'who was Pope Alexander VI?' 'He was not what one would describe as a good egg,' said Omally.

To understand Africa you must understand a basic impulsive savagery that is greater than anything we civilised people have encountered in two centuries

[History is] the story of the magnificent rear-guard action fought during several thousand years by dogma against curiosity.