Browsing Topic Best Historical Quotes

The urge to save humanity is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it. Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve. This is true even of the pious brethren who carry the gospel to foreign parts.

That government is best which governs least.

Culture is the name for what people are interested in, their thoughts, their models, the books they read and the speeches they hear, their table-talk, gossip, controversies, historical sense and scientific training, the values they appreciate, the quality of life they admire. All communities have a culture. It is the climate of their civilization.

Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.

Historical explanation is not identical with moral judgment.

A revolution that is based on the people exercising their creativity in the midst of devastation is one of the great historical contributions of humankind.

What we in America call terrorists are really groups of people that reject the international system.

Divide the world into regional groups as a transitional stage to world government. Populations will more readily abandon their national loyalty to a vague regional loyalty than they will for a world authority. Later the regions can be brought together all the way into a single world dictatorship.

If a lie is only printed often enough, it becomes a quasi-truth, and if such a truth is repeated often enough, it becomes an article of belief, a dogma, and men will die for it.

Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value – zero.

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.

Human beings can be redeemed. Empires cannot. Our refusal to face the truth about empire, our refusal to defy the multitudinous crimes and atrocities of empire, has brought about the nightmare Malcolm predicted. And as the Digital Age and our post-literate society implant a terrifying historical amnesia, these crimes are erased as swiftly as they are committed.

Today, in American imperialism, the commodity has reached its most grandiose historical manifestation.

Whatever the price of the Chinese Revolution, it has obviously succeeded not only in producing more efficient and dedicated administration, but also in fostering high morale and community of purpose. The social experiment in China under Chairman Mao’s leadership is one of the most important and successful in human history.

Wardruna is a combination of old and new. I use historical instruments and new and electronic instruments and tools. I use drones and samples to build these huge sounds. Sometimes just a sound can trigger words or melodies. I don’t have a romantic notion about the past; with Wardruna I wanted to create something new using something old.

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.

Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas.

… when the struggle seems to be drifting definitely towards a world social democracy, there may still be very great delays and disappointments before it becomes an efficient and beneficent world system. Countless people … will hate the New World Order and will die protesting against it. When we attempt to evaluate its promise, we have to bear in mind the distress of a generation or so of malcontents, many of them quite gallant and graceful-looking people.

If all the animals and man had been evolved in this ascendant manner, then there had been no first parents, no Eden, and no Fall. And if there had been no fall, then the entire historical fabric of Christianity, the story of the first sin and the reason for an atonement … collapsed like a house of cards.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

The writing of history is largely a process of diversion. Most historical accounts distract attention from the secret influences behind great events.

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.

One never really knows how much one has been touched by a place until one has left it.

History, in general, only informs us of what bad government is.

Cases of genocide carried out as policy may be found in historical documents as well as in the oral histories of Indigenous communities.

For the sake of historical truth I must verify that only the Greeks, of all the adversaries who confronted us, fought with bold courage and highest disregard of death.

The governments of the present day have to deal not merely with other governments, with emperors, kings and ministers, but also with the secret societies which have everywhere their unscrupulous agents, and can at the last moment upset all the governments’ plans.

That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history.

History is a gallery of pictures in which there are few originals and many copies.

I have resolved never to start an unjust war, but never to end a legitimate one except by defeating my enemies.

The financial system has been turned over to the Federal Reserve Board. That Board administers the finance system by authority of a purely profiteering group. The system is Private, conducted for the sole purpose of obtaining the greatest possible profits from the use of other people’s money.

If you think about the last 50 years, Africa’s proximity and historical context has absolutely been with Europe and the United States, but their approach in dealing with the economic challenges that Africa faces in particular has been one of handing out aid, not developing economies, not building a long term relationship around agriculture and so on.

The great masquerade of evil has played havoc with all our ethical concepts. For evil to appear disguised as light, charity, historical necessity, or social justice is quite bewildering to anyone brought up on our traditional ethical concepts, while for the Christian who bases his life on the Bible, it merely confirms the fundamental wickedness of evil.

There is no sociology worthy of the name which does not possess a historical character.

The midwife of history is violence.