40 Quotations Found

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad.

Author: Chuck Klosterman | Subjects: History, Personal Improvement

History is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: History

It is not the strength, but the duration of great sentiments that makes great men.

Author: Friedrich Nietzsche | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Personal Improvement

If we do not remember our heroes, we will produce no heroes. If we do not record their sacrifices, their sacrifices would have been in vain. […] the greatest strength we have as people is our common memories of the past and our common hopes for the future. […] For without those memories, the next generation will not have the fighting spirit to carry on. … [ Read more ]

Author: George Yeo | Subjects: History, Life & Society, Sociology | Anthropology

Neither a wise man nor a brave man lies down on the tracks of history to wait for the train of the future to run over him.

Author: Dwight D. Eisenhower | Subjects: Change, Concepts, History, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy

No empire long endures, even if few anticipate their demise. Every kingdom is born to die. The 15th century belonged to the Portuguese, the 16th to Spain, 17th to the Dutch. France dominated the 18th and Britain the 19th. Bled white and left bankrupt by the Great War, the British maintained a pretense of domination as late as 1935, when the empire reached its greatest … [ Read more ]

Author: Wade Davis | Source: Rolling Stone | Subjects: History, International

History isn’t just something that ought to be taught or ought to be read or ought to be encouraged because it’s going to make us a better citizen. It will make us a better citizen; or because it will make us a more thoughtful and understanding human being, which it will; or because it will cause us to behave better, which it will. It should … [ Read more ]

Author: David McCullough | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, History

Inequality, an issue politicians talked about hesitantly, if at all, a decade ago, is now a central focus of candidates in both parties. The terms of the debate, however, are about individuals and classes: the elite versus the middle, the 1 percent versus the 99 percent. That’s fair enough. But the language currently used to describe inequality doesn’t capture the way it is manifesting geographically. … [ Read more ]

Author: Phillip Longman | Source: The Atlantic | Subjects: America, Economics | Economy, History, International

Through the entire American story, white Christianity has served as the central source of moral legitimacy for a society explicitly built to value the lives of white people over Black people. And this legacy remains present and measurable in the cultural DNA of contemporary white Christianity, not only among evangelicals in the South but also among mainline Protestants in the Midwest and Catholics in the … [ Read more ]

Author: Robert P. Jones | Subjects: America, History, Race Relations, Religion

Our collective memory always tends toward amnesia and erasure — especially of periods scarred by civilizational shame.

Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: History, Life & Society

I think that he [Theodore Roosevelt] makes a serious mistake in interfering—politically, at least. His tendency to make the executive power stronger than the houses of congress is bound to be a bad thing, especially when a man of weaker personality succeeds him in office.

Author: Franklin D. Roosevelt | Subjects: History, Politics & Public Policy

If the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard … [ Read more ]

Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: America, History, International, Race Relations

All of the western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism. This means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority.

Author: James Baldwin | Subjects: History, International

Life is the sum of all your choices. History, by extrapolation, equals the accumulated choices of all mankind.

Note: only the first sentence is attributable to Camus I think…

Author: Albert Camus | Subjects: History, Life & Society

What’s life without a past to connect it to?

Author: Brent Wade | Subjects: History, Life & Society

“We have learned that you cannot live from history,” a Kosovo Serb told a New York Times reporter in 1999. “Americans have no history and they live wonderfully well.”

Some­times progress takes the form of historical amnesia.

But while applying the supposed lessons of history to the present may be inevitable, doing so is always perilous, for it involves the use of analogies that may, in hindsight, … [ Read more ]

Author: Christopher Clausen | Subject: History

One sure sign that farming is not congenial is that people throughout history have been determined to get other people to do it. Slavery does not exist among hunter-gatherers and apparently never did; it comes in with gardens and farms.

Indeed, it is now conventional wisdom among scholars that, as the physiologist Jared Diamond wrote some years ago in Discover magazine, “the adoption of agriculture, supposedly … [ Read more ]

Author: David Berreby | Subjects: Culture, History

History is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.

Author: Pierre Nora | Subjects: History, Memory

In making giants of the Founders, we make pygmies of ourselves; in making saints of them, we make sinners of ourselves. Sinners we may be, but no more so than they. And although humility is a virtue, when consciousness of our sins becomes an inferiority complex that causes large numbers of the present generation to turn away from politics as incomparably inept or corrupt, it … [ Read more ]

Author: H. W. Brands | Subjects: History, Politics & Public Policy

The idea was put forward in 1930 by a revered poet, Sir Mohammed Iqbal.

[…]‌

Iqbal’s argument was like this. Islam is not only an ethical ideal; it is also a “certain kind of polity.” Religion for a Muslim is not a matter of private conscience or private practice, as Christianity can be for the man in Europe. There never was, Iqbal says, a specifically Christian polity; … [ Read more ]

Author: V.S. Naipaul | Subjects: History, Religion