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|  Lord Acton | And remember, where you have a concentration of power in a few hands, all too frequently men with the mentality of gangsters get control. History has proven that. All power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely. | |
| John Adams | The Revolution was effected before the War commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations ... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution. | |
| John Adams | Objects of the most stupendous magnitude, and measure in which the lives and liberties of millions yet unborn are intimately interested, are now before us. We are in the very midst of a revolution the most complete, unexpected and remarkable of any in the history of nations. | |
| John Adams | The United States of America have exhibited, perhaps, the first example of governments erected on the simple principles of nature; and if men are now sufficiently enlightened to disabuse themselves of artifice, imposture, hypocrisy, and superstition, they will consider this event as an era in their history. Although the detail of the formation of the American governments is at present little known or regarded either in Europe or in America, it may hereafter become an object of curiosity. It will never be pretended that any persons employed in that service had interviews with the gods, or were in any degree under the influence of Heaven, more than those at work upon ships or houses, or laboring in merchandise or agriculture; it will forever be acknowledged that these governments were contrived merely by the use of reason and the senses. | |
| Samuel Adams | The liberties of our country, the freedom of our civil Constitution,
are worth defending at all hazards;
and it is our duty to defend them against all attacks.
We have received them as a fair inheritance from our worthy ancestors:
they purchased them for us with toil and danger and expense of treasure
and blood, and transmitted them to us with care and diligence.
It will bring an everlasting mark of infamy on the present generation,
enlightened as it is, if we should suffer them to be wrested from us
by violence without a struggle, or to be cheated out of them
by the artifices of false and designing men. | |
| Arnold Ahlert | [A] deep-rooted culture of incompetence and corruption has made it virtually impossible for government to function fairly and efficiently. And because most government employees are shielded by layers of protection, they couldn't care less. Never before in the history of this nation has there been a greater divide between a self-serving federal leviathan and millions of Americans... 'Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem,' Ronald Reagan reminded us during his inaugural address in 1981. Nothing's changed since then, with one exception: It's gotten far worse. | |
| Mark Alexander | Chief among the spoils of victory is the privilege of writing the history. | |
| Eric Alterman | History is replete with examples of empires mounting impressive military campaigns on the cusp of their impending economic collapse. | |
| Harry J. Anslinger | Marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind. | |
| Hannah Arendt | No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie -- a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days -- but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please. | |
| Hannah Arendt | The main characteristic of any event is that it has not been foreseen. We don’t know the future but everybody acts into the future. Nobody knows what he is doing because the future is being done, action is being done by a “we” and not an “I.” Only if I were the only one acting could I foretell the consequences of what I’m doing. What actually happens is entirely contingent, and contingency is indeed one of the biggest factors in all history. Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history -- or at least history since the Middle Ages -- had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise? | |
| W. H. Auden | Political history is far too criminal and pathological to be a fit subject of study for the young. Children should acquire their heroes and villains from fiction. | |
| St. Augustine | Though defensive violence will always be 'a sad necessity' in the eyes of men of principle, it would be still more unfortunate if wrongdoers should dominate just men. | |
| Caesar Augustus | I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble. | |
| Marcus Aurelius | He who has seen present things has seen all, both everything which has taken place from all eternity and everything which will be for time without end; for all things are of one kin and of one form. | |
| Francis Bacon | So when any of the four pillars of government, are mainly shaken, or weakened (which are religion, justice, counsel, and treasure), men had need to pray for fair weather. | |
| Francis Bacon | Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider. | |
| Doug Bandow | The history of the welfare state is the history of public enterprise pushing out private organization. The impact was largely unintentional, but natural and inevitable. Higher taxes left individuals with less money to give; government’s assumption of responsibility for providing welfare shriveled the perceived duty of individuals to respond to their neighbors’ needs; and the availability of public programs gave recipients an alternative to private assistance, one which did not challenge recipients to reform their destructive behavior. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Actually, it is not strange that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the human race was regarded as inert matter, ready to receive everything -- form, face, energy, movement, life -- from a great prince or a great legislator or a great genius. These centuries were nourished on the study of antiquity. And antiquity presents everywhere -- in Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome -- the spectacle of a few men molding mankind according to their whims, thanks to the prestige of force and of fraud. But this does not prove that this situation is desirable. It proves only that since men and society are capable of improvement, it is naturally to be expected that error, ignorance, despotism, slavery, and superstition should be greatest towards the origins of history. The writers quoted above were not in error when they found ancient institutions to be such, but they were in error when they offered them for the admiration and imitation of future generations. Uncritical and childish conformists, they took for granted the grandeur, dignity, morality, and happiness of the artificial societies of the ancient world. They did not understand that knowledge appears and grows with the passage of time; and that in proportion to this growth of knowledge, might takes the side of right, and society regains possession of itself. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Everyone wants to live at the expense of the state. They forget that the state lives at the expense of everyone. | |
| Frederic Bastiat | Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws.
On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand
that caused men to make laws in the first place. | |
| Bell v. Hood | History is clear that the first ten amendments to the Constitution were adopted to secure certain common law rights of the people, against invasion by the Federal Government. | |
| Andrew Bernstein | For the first time in history, the rational and the good are fully armed in the battle against evil. Here we finally find the answer to our paradox; now we can understand the nature of the social power held by evil. Ultimately, the evil, the irrational, truly has no power. The evil men’s control of morality is transient; it lives on borrowed time made possible only by the errors of the good. In time, as more honest men grasp the truth, evil’s stranglehold will be easily broken. | |
| Ambrose Bierce | History is an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers, mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools. | |
| Jim Bishop | A good writer of history is a guy who is suspicious. Suspicion marks the real difference between the man who wants to write honest history and the one who’d rather write a good story. | |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | History is the version of past events that people have decided to agree upon. | |
| Justice William J. Brennan | The concept of military necessity is seductively broad, and has a dangerous plasticity. Because they invariably have the visage of overriding importance, there is always a temptation to invoke security "necessities" to justify an encroachment upon civil liberties. For that reason, the military-security argument must be approached with a healthy skepticism. | |
| Reuven Brenner | Historians and economists are very good at creating and perpetuating myths that justify increasing the power placed in the hands of government. | |
| Warren Buffett | Nothing sedates rationality like large doses of effortless money. After a heady experience of that kind, normally sensible people drift into behavior akin to that of Cinderella at the ball. | |
| Warren Buffett | ...it's a good idea to review past mistakes before committing new ones. | |
| Edmund Burke | People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors. | |
| George W. Bush | Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories concerning the attacks of September the 11th; malicious lies that attempt to shift the blame away from the terrorists, themselves, away from the guilty. | |
| Vannevar Bush | Presumably man's spirit should be elevated if he can better review his shady past and analyze more completely and objectively his present problems. | |
| Georg Cantor | A false conclusion once arrived at and widely accepted is not easily dislodged and the less it is understood the more tenaciously it is held. | |
| Nicolas-Sebasstien Chamfort | Only the history of free peoples is worth our attention; the history of men under a despotism is merely a collection of anecdotes. | |
| John Chancellor | Now the 21st century approaches and with it the inevitability of change. We must wonder if the American people will find renewal and rejuvenation within themselves, will discover again their capacity for innovation and adaptation. If not, alas, the nation's future will be shaped by sightless forces of history over which Americans will have no control. | |
| Nien Cheng | [A]fter unleashing the Red Guards … to serve his political purposes, Mao Zedong was no longer able to control them. | |
| Nien Cheng | Day and night the city resounded with the loud noise of drums and gongs … looting and the ransacking of private homes … The violence of the Red Guards seemed to have escalated. … Articles in the newspapers … encouraged the Red Guards and congratulated them on their vandalism. They were … exhorted to be fearless in their work of toppling the old world and building a new one based on Mao’s teachings. | |
| Nien Cheng | The newspaper announced that the mission of the Red Guards was to rid the country of the ‘Four Olds’: old culture, old customs, old habits, and old ways of thinking. There was no clear definition of ‘old’; it was left to the Red Guards to decide. First of all, they changed street names. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | The last few decades have been marked by a special cultivation of the romance of the future. We seem to have made up our minds to misunderstand what has happened; and we turn, with a sort of relief, to stating what will happen-which is apparently much easier...The modern mind is forced towards the future by a certain sense of fatigue, not unmixed with terror, with which it regards the past. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | We all have a little weakness, which is very natural but rather misleading, for supposing that this epoch must be the end of the world because it will be the end of us. How future generations will get on without us is indeed, when we come to think of it, quite a puzzle. But I suppose they will get on somehow, and may possibly venture to revise our judgments as we have revised earlier judgments. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | For good or evil, a line has been passed in our political history; and something that we have known all our lives is dead. I will take only one example of it: our politicians can no longer be caricatured. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | Nothing is so remote from us as the thing which is not old enough to be history and not new enough to be news. | |
| Gilbert Keith Chesterton | It isn't that they can't see the solution. It is that they can't see the problem. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | History will be kind to me for I intend to write it. | |
| Sir Winston Churchill | A nation that forgets its past is doomed to repeat it. | |
| Winston Churchill | The farther backward you can look, the farther forward you are likely to see. | |
| Winston Churchill | This truth may be unfashionable, unpalatable, no doubt unpopular, but, if it is the truth, the story of mankind shows that war was universal and unceasing for millions of years before armaments were invented or armies organized. Indeed, the lucid intervals of peace and order only occurred in human history after armaments in the hands of strong governments have come into being, and civilization in every age has been nursed only in cradles guarded by superior weapons and superior discipline. | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | A bureaucrat is the most despicable of men, though he is needed as vultures are needed, but one hardly admires vultures whom bureaucrats so strangely resemble. I have yet to meet a bureaucrat who was not petty, dull, almost witless, crafty or stupid, an oppressor or a thief, a holder of little authority in which he delights, as a boy delights in possessing a vicious dog. Who can trust such creatures? | |
| Marcus Tullius Cicero | To be ignorant of what happened before you were born... is to live the life of a child for ever. | |
| Harlan Cleveland | For the problem of decision-making in our complicated world is not how to get the problem simple enough so that we can all understand it; the problem is how to get our thinking about the problem as complex as humanly possible--and thus approach (we can never match) the complexity of the real world around us. | |
| Bill Clinton | We can't be so fixated on our desire to preserve the rights of ordinary Americans... | |
| Bill Clinton | Nothing in the First Amendment converts our public schools into religion-free zones or requires all religious expression to be left behind at the schoolhouse door. … Government’s schools also may not discriminate against private religious expression during the school day. | |
| Bill Clinton | The First Amendment does not require students to leave their religion at the schoolhouse door. … If students can wear T-shirts advertising sports teams, rock groups or politicians, they can also wear T-shirts that promote religion. … Religion is too important to our history and our heritage for us to keep it out of our schools. | |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | Every reform, however necessary, will by weak minds be carried to an excess, that itself will need reforming. | |
| Alistair Cooke | As for the rage to believe that we have found the secret of liberty in general permissiveness from the cradle on, this seems to me a disastrous sentimentality, which, whatever liberties it sets loose, loosens also the cement that alone can bind society into a stable compound -- a code of obeyed taboos. I can only recall the saying of a wise Frenchman that `liberty is the luxury of self-discipline.' Historically, those peoples that did not discipline themselves had discipline thrust on them from the outside. That is why the normal cycle in the life and death of great nations has been first a powerful tyranny broken by revolt, the enjoyment of liberty, the abuse of liberty -- and back to tyranny again. As I see it, in this country -- a land of the most persistent idealism and the blandest cynicism -- the race is on between its decadence and its vitality. | |
| Alistair Cooke | Liberty is the luxury of self-discipline, that those nations historically who have failed to discipline themselves have had discipline imposed by others. | |
| Calvin Coolidge | A wholesome regard for the memory of the great men of long ago is the best assurance to a people of a continuation of great men to come, who shall be able to instruct, to lead, and to inspire. A people who worship at the shrine of true greatness will themselves be truly great. | |
| Copernicus | Finally we shall place the Sun himself at the center of the Universe. All this is suggested by the systematic procession of events and the harmony of the whole Universe, if only we face the facts, as they say, `with both eyes open'. | |
| Norman Cousins | History is a vast early warning system. | |
| Norman Cousins | A library, to modify the famous metaphor of Socrates, should be the delivery room for the birth of ideas – a place where history comes to life. | |
| Michael Crichton | Let's be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. | |
| Charles Darwin | To suppose that the eye [...] could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree. When it was first said that the sun stood still and the world turned round, the common sense of mankind declared the doctrine false; but the old saying of Vox populi, vox Dei, as every philosopher knows, cannot be trusted in science. Reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a simple and imperfect eye to one complex and perfect can be shown to exist, each grade being useful to its possessor, as is certainly the case; if further, the eye ever varies and the variations be inherited, as is likewise certainly the case and if such variations should be useful to any animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered as subversive of the theory. | |
| Jefferson Davis | Neither current events nor history show that the majority rule, or ever did rule. | |
| Honoré de Balzac | There are two histories : official history, lying, and then secret history, where you find the real causes of events. | |
| Charles de Montesquieu | The deterioration of every government begins with the decay of the principles on which it was founded. | |
| Eugene Debs | They have always taught and trained you to believe it to be your patriotic duty to go to war and to have yourselves slaughtered at their command. But in all the history of the world you, the people, have never had a voice in declaring war, and strange as it certainly appears, no war by any nation in any age has ever been declared by the people. | |
| Daniel Dennett | There's nothing I like less than bad arguments for a view that I hold dear. | |
| Rene Descartes | Each problem that I solved became a rule which served afterwards to solve other problems. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Truth travels slowly, but it will reach even you in time. | |
| Benjamin Disraeli | Nurture your mind with great thoughts, for you will never go any higher than you think. | |
| John Dobbins | The notion of editorial independence from ownership only dates back to the 1930s. Prior to that time the media was openly biased and that includes the Press that the founding fathers dealt with. Some of the founders like Hamilton and Franklin had actually ran media outlets that were very biased. You used to have things like Newspapers that openly proclaimed they were a Democratic or Republican or Whig or a Federalist newspaper right on the banner. The concept of an independent and allegedly neutral press was and still is mainly pushed by people from the left who do NOT want anything remotely neutral, but who instead want to make sure those "evil" business interests don't have a means of getting their side aired without it being filtered by their idea of what a neutral press consists of. | |
| Dr. Bella Dodd | I was at last beginning to see how ignorant I had become, how long since I had read anything except Party literature. I thought of our bookshelves stripped of books questioned by the Party, how when a writer was expelled from the Party his books went, too. I thought of the systematic rewriting of Soviet history, the revaluation, and in some cases the blotting out of any mention of such persons as Trotsky. I thought of the successive purges. Suddenly I too wanted the answers to the questions Senator Hickenlooper was asking and I wanted the truth. I found myself hitting at the duplicity of the Communist Party. | |
| William O. Douglas | The right to revolt has sources deep in our history. | |
| Frederick Douglass | I know no class of my fellowmen, however just, enlightened, and humane, which can be wisely and safely trusted absolutely with the liberties of any other class. | |
| Frederick Douglass | The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. | |
| John Dryden | We find few historians who have been diligent enough in their search for truth; it is their common method to take on trust what they help distribute to the public; by which means a falsehood once received from a famed writer becomes traditional to posterity. | |
| John J. Dunphy | The concept of a Supreme Being who childishly demands to be constantly
placated by prayers and sacrifice and dispenses justice like some corrupt
petty judge whose decisions may be swayed by a bit of well-timed flattery
should be relegated to the trash bin of history, along with the belief in a
flat earth and the notion that diseases are caused by demonic possession.
Ironically, the case for the involuntary retirement of God may have been
best stated by one Saul or Paul of Tarsus, a first-century tentmaker and
Pharisee of the tribe of Benjamin, who wrote, 'When I was a child, I spake
as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became
a man, I put away childish things' (I Corinthians 13:11). Those words are
no less relevant today than they were two thousand years ago. | |
| John J. Dunphy | The history of Christianity has been largely written in blood, the
blood of those whom it has sought to proselytize as well as that of those
Christians who did not share the theology or ambitions of the male clerical
oligarchy that has always wielded power in Christendom. This ignoble
distinction is not nor has it ever been the exclusive prerogative of any
particular denomination or sect; it is a living legacy of horror that is
tragically common to the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox
bodies of Christian churches. | |
| Will Durant | [H]istory assures us that civilizations decay quite leisurely. | |
| Albert Einstein | We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds. | |
| Albert Einstein | Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocrities. The latter cannot understand it when a man does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses his intelligence. | |
| Albert Einstein | The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking that we have done so far, has created problems we cannot solve at the level of thinking at which we created them. | |
| Albert Einstein | Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity. | |
| Albert Einstein | Why does this applied science, which saves work and makes life easier, bring us so little happiness? The simple answer runs: Because we have not yet learned to make sensible use of it. | |
| Albert Einstein | Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid. | |
| Dwight D. Eisenhower | Here in America we are descended in spirit from revolutionaries and rebels -- men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. | |
| Ralph Waldo Emerson | America is another name for opportunity. Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine Providence in behalf of the human race. | |
| Felix Frankfurter | The history of liberty has largely been the history of the observance of procedural safeguards. | |
| Felix Frankfurter | It is easy to make light of insistence on scrupulous regard for the safeguards of civil liberties when invoked on behalf of the unworthy. History bears testimony that by such disregard are the rights of liberty extinguished, heedlessly at first, then stealthily, and brazenly in the end. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | [A]s all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the
governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions,
actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the
revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented
with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all
resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get
first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | When the people find they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. | |
| Benjamin Franklin | ... as all history informs us, there has been in every State & Kingdom a constant kind of warfare between the governing & governed: the one striving to obtain more for its support, and the other to pay less. And this has alone occasioned great convulsions, actual civil wars, ending either in dethroning of the Princes, or enslaving of the people. Generally indeed the ruling power carries its point, the revenues of princes constantly increasing, and we see that they are never satisfied, but always in want of more. The more the people are discontented with the oppression of taxes; the greater need the prince has of money to distribute among his partisans and pay the troops that are to suppress all resistance, and enable him to plunder at pleasure. There is scarce a king in a hundred who would not, if he could, follow the example of Pharaoh, get first all the peoples money, then all their lands, and then make them and their children servants for ever ... | |
| Benjamin Franklin | History will also give Occasion to expatiate on the Advantage of Civil Orders and Constitutions, how Men and their Properties are protected by joining in Societies and establishing Government; their Industry encouraged and rewarded, Arts invented, and Life made more comfortable: The Advantages of Liberty, Mischiefs of Licentiousness, Benefits arising from good Laws and a due Execution of Justice, &c. Thus may the first Principles of sound Politicks be fix'd in the Minds of Youth. | |
| Frederick the Great | I begin by taking.
I shall find scholars later
to demonstrate my perfect right. | |
| Frederick the Great | The truth is always the strongest argument. | |
| Frederick the Great | The greatest and noblest pleasure which men can have in this world is to discover new truths; and the next is to shake off old prejudices. | |
| Milton Friedman | To the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them. He is proud of a common heritage and loyal to common traditions. But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served. | |
| Erich Fromm | The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots. | |
| Buckminster Fuller | To expose a 4.2 Trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business. | |
| Rocco Galati | 19 terrorists in 6 weeks have been able to command 300 million North Americans to do away with the entirety of their civil liberties that took 700 years to advance from the Magna Carta onward. The terrorists have already won the political and ideological war with one terrorist act. It is mindboggling that we are that weak as a society. | |
| Carl Friedrich Gauss | If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries. | |
| Elbridge Gerry | What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty. ...Whenever Governments mean to invade the rights and liberties of the people, they always attempt to destroy the militia, in order to raise an army upon their ruins. | |
| A. Bartlett Giamatti | Far better to think historically, to remember the lessons of the past. Thus, far better to conceive of power as consisting in part of the knowledge of when not to use all the power you have. Far better to be one who knows that if you reserve the power not to use all your power, you will lead others far more successfully and well. | |
| Edward Gibbon | History is indeed little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind. | |
| Jo Godwin | A truly great library contains something in it to offend everyone. | |
| Hermann Goering | I am what I have always been: the last Renaissance man, if I may be allowed to say so. | |
| Barry Goldwater | And here we encounter the seeds of government disaster and collapse -- the kind that wrecked ancient Rome and every other civilization that allowed a sociopolitical monster called the welfare state to exist. | |
| Nathan Hale | I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country. | |
| Manley P. Hall | Secret societies have existed among all peoples, savage and civilized, since the beginning of recorded history...It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence... | |
| Sir John Harington | Treason doth never prosper, what's the reason? For if it prosper, none dare call it Treason. | |
| Sydney J. Harris | Nobody can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | The profoundest truth of war is that the issue of battle is usually decided in the minds of the opposing commanders, not in the bodies of their men. | |
| B. H. Liddell Hart | In strategy the longest way round is often the shortest way there; a direct approach to the object exhausts the attacker and hardens the resistance by compression, whereas an indirect approach loosens the defender's hold by upsetting his balance. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | From the saintly and single-minded idealist to the fanatic is often but a step. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | Many of the greatest things man has achieved are not the result of consciously directed thought, and still less the product of a deliberately coordinated effort of many individuals, but of a process in which the individual plays a part which he can never fully understand. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The system of private property is the most important guaranty of freedom, not only for those who own property, but scarcely less for those who do not. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The history of government management of money has, except for a few short happy periods, been one of incessant fraud and deception. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | The ultimate decision about what is accepted as right and wrong will be made not by individual human wisdom but by the disappearance of the groups that have adhered to the "wrong" beliefs. | |
| Friedrich August von Hayek | I am certain that nothing has done so much to destroy the juridical safeguards of individual freedom as the striving after this mirage of social justice. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | The only thing we learn from history is that we learn nothing from history. | |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | What experience and history teach is this -- that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it. | |
| Robert A. Heinlein | Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Nations and peoples who forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedoms. | |
| Frank Herbert | Laws to suppress tend to strengthen what they would prohibit.
This is the fine point on which all legal professions of history have based their job security. | |
| George D. Herron | The possession of power over others is inherently destructive both to the possessor of the power and to those over whom it is exercised. | |
| Adolf Hitler | The most foolish mistake we could possibly make would be to allow the subject races to possess arms. History shows that all conquerors who have allowed the subject races to carry arms have prepared their own downfall by so doing. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the supply of arms to the underdogs is a sine qua non for the overthrow of any sovereignty. | |
| Eric Hoffer | It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power -- power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate. | |
| Frank E. Holman | The president of the American Bar Association begins a nationwide tour, giving speeches on the dangers of Treaty Law: 'The doctrine that the treaty power is unlimited and omnipotent and may be used to OVERRIDE the Constitution and the Bill of Rights...is a doctrine of recent origin and largely derived from Missouri v. Holland.' | |
| Jack Hugh | Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. | |
| Jack Hugh | Historically, much of the motivation for public schooling has been to stifle variety and institute social control. | |
| Justice Charles Evans Hughes | The liberty of the press is not confined to newspapers and periodicals. It necessarily embraces pamphlets and leaflets. These indeed have been historic weapons in the defense of liberty, as the pamphlets of Thomas Paine and others in our history abundantly attest. | |
| David Hume | It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once. | |
| Aldous Huxley | That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history. | |
| Thomas Henry Huxley | Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. | |
| Julian Jaynes | History does not move by leaps into unrelated novelty, but rather by the selective emphasis of aspects of its own immediate past. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | On every question of construction [of the Constitution] let us carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or intended against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | I agree with you that it is the duty of every good citizen to use all the opportunities, which occur to him, for preserving documents relating to the history of our country. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Why suspend the habeas corpus in insurrections and rebellions?
Examine the history of England. See how few of the cases of the
suspension of the habeas corpus law have been worthy of that
suspension. They have been either real treasons, wherein the parties
might as well have been charged at once, or sham plots, where it was
shameful they should ever have been suspected. Yet for the few cases
wherein the suspension of the habeas corpus has done real good, that
operation is now become habitual and the minds of the nation almost
prepared to live under its constant suspension. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | History, in general, only informs us what bad government is. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | To your request of my opinion of the manner in which a newspaper should be conducted, so as to be most useful, I should answer, "by restraining it to true facts & sound principles only." Yet I fear such a paper would find few subscribers. It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Our legislators are not sufficiently appraised of the rightful limits of their power; that their true office is to declare and enforce our natural rights and duties, and to take none of them from us. No man has a natural right to commit aggression on the equal rights of another; and this is all from which the laws ought to restrain him; every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him; and, no man having the right to be the judge between himself and another, it is his natural duty to submit to the umpirage of an impartial third [party]. When the laws have declared and enforced all this, they have fulfilled their functions; and the idea is quite unfounded, that on entering into society we give up any natural right. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | A morsel of genuine history is a thing so rare as to be always valuable. | |
| Thomas Jefferson | Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | Every good historian is almost by definition a revisionist. He looks at the accepted view of a particular historic episode or period with a very critical eye. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | Throughout history, the attachment of even the humblest people to their freedom…has come as an unpleasant shock to condescending ideologues. | |
| Paul Bede Johnson | The study of history is a powerful antidote to contemporary arrogance. It is humbling to discover how many of our glib assumptions, which seem to us novel and plausible, have been tested before, not once but many times and in innumerable guises; and discovered to be, at great human cost, wholly false. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | All theory is against freedom of the will; all experience for it. | |
| Dr. Samuel Johnson | In questions of law or of fact conscience is very often confounded with opinion. No man’s conscience can tell him the rights of another man; they must be known by rational investigation or historical inquiry. | |
| Juvenal | Now that no one buys our votes, the public has long since cast off its cares; for the people that once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else, now meddles no more and longs eagerly for just two things -- bread and circuses. | |
| Helen Keller | There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his. | |
| Charles F. Kettering | ...you must take the problem as it is, and let it be what it wants to be. | |
| Charles F. Kettering | Whenever you look at a piece of work and you think the fellow was crazy, then you want to pay some attention to that. One of you is likely to be, and you better find out which one it is. It makes an awful lot of difference. | |
| Charles F. Kettering | And there is the point exactly, we are all the time blaming difficulties on to something else. Our real trouble is that we are too soft to solve the problem. | |
| John Maynard Keynes | The difficulty lies not in the new ideas but in escaping from the old ones. | |
| John Maynard Keynes | Those, who are strongly wedded to what I shall call 'the classical theory', will fluctuate, I expect, between a belief that I am quite wrong and a belief that I am saying nothing new. It is for others to determine if either of these or the third alternative is right. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and consciencious stupidity. | |
| Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. | The limitation of riots, moral questions aside, is that they cannot win and their participants know it. Hence, rioting is not revolutionary but reactionary because it invites defeat. It involves an emotional catharsis, but it must be followed by a sense of futility. | |
| Rudyard Kipling | All we have of freedom--all we use or know--
This our fathers bought for us, long and long ago. | |
| Paul Krugman | Heterodox doctrines, in economics and elsewhere, often fail to get adequately discussed in their formative stages: both the intellectual and the political establishment tend to regard them as unworthy of notice. Meanwhile, those doctrines can seem compelling to large numbers of people (some of whom may have considerable political clout, large financial resources, or both). By the time it becomes apparent that such influential ideas demand serious attention after all, reasoned argument has become very difficult. People have become invested emotionally, politically, and financially in the doctrine; careers and even institutions have been built on it; and the proponents can no longer allow themselves to contemplate the possibility that they have taken a wrong turning. | |
| Robert M. Lafollette, Sr. | The principle of free speech is no new doctrine born of the Constitution of the United States. It is a heritage of English-speaking peoples, which has been won by incalculable sacrifice, and which they must preserve so long as they hope to live as free men. | |
| Latin Proverb | History is written by the victor. | |
| John le Carré | I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people. | |
| C. S. Lewis | In the ancient world individuals have sold themselves as slaves, in order to eat. So in society. Here is a witch-doctor who can save us from the sorcerers -- a war-lord who can save us from the barbarians -- a Church that can save us from Hell. Give them what they ask, give ourselves to them bound and blindfold, if only they will! Perhaps the terrible bargain will be made again. We cannot blame men for making it. We can hardly wish them not to. Yet we can hardly bear that they should. | |
| Joseph Lewis | The burning of an author’s books, imprisonment for opinion’s sake, has always been the tribute that an ignorant age pays to the genius of its time. | |
| Abraham Lincoln | My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. | |
| F. J. Lucas | Within seven centuries, [the ancient Greeks] invented for itself, epic, elegy, lyric, tragedy, novel, democratic government, political and economic science, history, geography, philosophy, physics and biology; and made revolutionary advances in architecture, sculpture, painting, music, oratory, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, anatomy, engineering, law and war... a stupendous feat for whose most brilliant state Attica was the size of Hertfordshire, with a free population (including children) of perhaps 160,000. | |
| Peter Lynch | I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it? | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | History fails to record a single precedent in which nations subject to moral decay have not passed into political and economic decline. There has been either a spiritual awakening to overcome the moral lapse, or a progressive deterioration leading to ultimate national disaster. | |
| General Douglas MacArthur | Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervour - with the cry of grave national emergency. Always, there has been some terrible evil at home, or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the
exorbitant sums demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real. | |
| James Madison | Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can
only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government. | |
| James Madison | The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of government most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature. | |
| James Madison | Do not separate text from historical background. If you do, you will have perverted and subverted the Constitution, which can only end in a distorted, bastardized form of illegitimate government. | |
| Clarence Manion | The Declaration of Independence is the all-time masterpiece of ideological simplification. There in a single sentence of self-evident truth, the founding Fathers put into clear, easily understandable focus, the broad basis of man's relationship to God, to government, and to his fellow man. | |
| Thomas Martin | However, is it not prudent, since no one has gone into the future, to pay attention to our elders? | |
| Tony Martin | There is no such thing as the last word in history. There is always scope for debate in the reading of history which is never static. | |
| John E. McLaughlin | In my profession, it is not enough to know your history, speak a language and be widely traveled. Equally important is how to weigh and organize evidence. How to listen. How to see a situation from the other person's point of view. How to deal with complexity and realize that few issues in the world come with just one side. How to learn, not what to think. | |
| H. L. Mencken | No article of faith is proof against the disintegrating effects of increasing information; one might almost describe the acquirement of knowledge as a process of disillusion. | |
| H. L. Mencken | The Gettysburg speech was at once the shortest and the most famous oration in American history...the highest emotion reduced to a few poetical phrases. Lincoln himself never even remotely approached it. It is genuinely stupendous. But let us not forget that it is poetry, not logic; beauty, not sense. Think of the argument in it. Put it into the cold words of everyday. The doctrine is simply this: that the Union soldiers who died at Gettysburg sacrificed their lives to the cause of self-determination -- that government of the people, by the people, for the people, should not perish from the earth. It is difficult to imagine anything more untrue. The Union soldiers in the battle actually fought against self-determination; it was the Confederates who fought for the right of their people to govern themselves. | |
| H. L. Mencken | [T]he only thing wrong with Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address was that it was the South, not the North, that was fighting for a government of the people, by the people and for the people. | |
| Frank Straus Meyer | The ideal type of the Communist is a man in whom all individual, emotional, and unconscious elements have been reduced to a minimum and subjected to the control of an iron will, informed by a supple intellect. That intellect is totally at the service of a single and compelling idea, made incarnate in the Communist Party: the concept of History as an inexorable god whose ways are revealed ‘scientifically’ through the doctrine and method of Marxism-Leninism. | |
| Jules Michelet | The historian’s first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth. | |
| John Stuart Mill | The worth of a state, in the long run, is the worth of the individuals composing it. | |
| Samuel Eliot Morison | If the American Revolution had produced nothing but the Declaration of Independence, it would have been worthwhile. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | In Germany, the Nazis first came for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics, but I didn't speak up because I was a protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak for me. | |
| Reverend Martin Niemoeller | When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.
When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.
When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.
When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out. | |
| Lyn Nofziger | The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country. A better educated electorate might change the reason many persons vote. If children were forced to learn about the Constitution, about how government works, about how this nation came into being, about taxes and about how government forever threatens the cause of liberty perhaps we wouldn't see so many foolish ideas coming out of the mouths of silly old men. | |
| Novalis | We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds. | |
| George Orwell | Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past. | |
| George Orwell | Every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered...History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. | |
| Ovid | Let others praise ancient times; I am glad I was born in these. | |
| Camille Paglia | It is capitalist America that produced the modern independent woman. Never in history have women had more freedom of choice in regard to dress, behavior, career, and sexual orientation. | |
| Thomas Paine | Time makes more converts than reason. | |
| Thomas Paine | Age after age has passed away, for no other purpose than to behold their wretchedness. | |
| Tom G. Palmer | [L]et me point out that libertarians defend a tradition of liberty that is the fruit of thousands of years of human history. | |
| Blaise Pascal | All err the more dangerously because each follows a truth. Their mistake lies not in following a falsehood but in not following another truth. | |
| Martin Pawley | ....it is always easier to tell people what to do than to find out what is happening... | |
| Everett Piper | History has taught us time and again that political power always raises its angry fist when timeless principles are lost. We know that without the scale of "self-evident truths" grounded in the "laws of nature and nature's God," every culture eventually finds itself subject to the rule of the gang or the tyranny of the individual. Recognizing this, scholars of all ages have confidently given their hearts and minds to the words, "You shall know the truth and the
truth shall set you free. | |
| Plato | The people have always some champion whom they set over them and nurse into greatness… This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs, when he first appears he is a protector. | |
| Plutarch | Perseverance is more prevailing than violence; and many things which cannot be overcome when they are together, yield themselves up when taken little by little. | |
| Bruce D. Porter | Throughout the history of the United States, war has been the primary impetus behind the growth and development of the central state. It has been the lever by which presidents and other national officials have bolstered the power of the state in the face of tenacious popular resistance. | |
| Proverb | Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. | |
| Vladimir Putin | Our anti-crisis policy is directed to internal demand support, social security of citizens and creation of new jobs. Like many other countries, we are reducing taxes on production, investing money in the economy. We are optimising state expenses. | |
| Vladimir Putin | We must seek support in the moral values that have ensured the progress of our civilization. Honesty and hard work, responsibility and faith in our strength are bound to bring us success. There should be no place for despondency. The crisis can and must be fought by uniting our intellectual, spiritual and material resources. | |
| Vladimir Putin | I think that the 21st-century economy is an economy of people, not of factories. The intellectual aspect in the global economic development has grown immensely. That’s why we plan to concentrate on creating additional opportunities for our people to realise their potential. | |
| Vladimir Putin | Let us be frank: provoking military-political instability and other regional conflicts is also a convenient way of deflecting people’s attention from mounting social and economic problems. Regrettably, further attempts of this kind cannot be ruled out. | |
| Vladimir Putin | Unfortunately, more and more often we hear that increasing military spending will help solve today’s social and economic problems. The logic here is quite simple. Additional allocations for military needs create new jobs.
For reference:
The growth of military spending:
USA—$529 billion in 2006, $555 billion in 2007, and $583 billion in 2008. Experts expect $606 billion in 2009.
Great Britain—£27 billion in 2006, £31 billion in 2007, £34 billion in 2008, and £35.2 billion planned for 2009.
Germany—€23 billion in 2006, €24 billion in 2007, and €25 billion in 2008.
China—$38 billion in 2006, $44 billion in 2007, $58 billion in 2008, and a 17% increase in 2009 (around $66 billion).
Georgia (according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute)—$49 million in 2002, $80 million in 2004, $362 million in 2006, $592 million in 2007, and $1.104 billion in 2008.
At a glance, it seems to be merely a method to fight the crisis and unemployment. Perhaps, in the short run, such a measure may yield some results. But in reality, instead of solving the problem, militarisation pushes it to a deeper level. It draws away from the economy immense financial and material resources, which could have been used much more efficiently elsewhere. | |
| Vladimir Putin | One must not allow oneself to skid down to isolationism and unbridled economic egoism. ... The second possible mistake would be excessive interference into the economic life of the country. And the absolute faith into the all-mightiness of the state. | |
| Vladimir Putin | During the time of the Soviet Union the role of the state in economy was made absolute, which eventually lead to the total non-competitiveness of the economy. That lesson cost us very dearly. I am sure nobody would want history to repeat itself.
We should also be aware that for during the last months, we have been witnessing the washout of the entrepreneurship spirit. That includes the principle of the personal responsibility – of a businessman, an investor or a share-holder – for his or her own decisions. There are no grounds to suggest that by putting the responsibility over to the state, one can achieve better results.
Another thing – handling crisis must not turn into financial populism, into rejecting a responsible macro-economic policy. Unreasonable expansion of the budget deficit, accumulation of the national debt – are as destructive as an adventurous stock market game. | |
| Anthony Quayle | To understand a man, you must know his memories. The same is true of a nation. | |
| Isidor Issac Rabi | Most new insights come only after a superabundant accumulation of facts have removed the blindness which prevented us from seeing what later comes to be regarded as obvious. | |
| Ayn Rand | It is futile to fight against, if one does not know what one is fighting for. | |
| Ayn Rand | We are fast approaching the stage of the ultimate inversion: the stage where the government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission; which is the stage of the darkest periods of human history, the stage of rule by brute force. | |
| Ayn Rand | Every major horror of history was committed in the name of an altruistic motive. | |
| Ronald Reagan | History teaches that wars begin when governments believe the price of aggression is cheap. | |
| Ronald Reagan | We've got to teach history based not on what's in fashion but what's important. If we forget what we did, we won't know who we are. I'm warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. | |
| Charley Reese | Congress is extraordinarily reluctant to inject itself into foreign policy. It has dumped entirely its constitutional duty for money onto
a central bank, and for trade, onto the executive branch. It seems to never know what the CIA and other intelligence agencies are doing. Like the
Romans, they no longer talk of the republic or liberty. And like the Romans, the American people, or most of them anyway, don’t seem to care. ...
Like the Romans, we no longer have a citizen army but professional legions, and whether they wear jackboots or not, some federal officers seem to
regard Americans with about the same compassion as the Praetorian Guard had for the plebes. As in Rome, the air is full of suspicion, intrigues and
conspiracies, real or imagined, and the air reeks of greed and opportunism. As those on the Tiber, the rulers on the Potomac have grown
suspicious of the people, don’t trust them and, in some cases fear them. And, as in Rome, they grovel in luxury while taking 40 cents on the dollar
out of the sweat of working people to pay for corn and circuses to keep the mob satisfied. | |
| Report of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the Committee on the Judiciary | The conclusion is thus inescapable that the history, concept, and wording of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, as well as its interpretation by every major commentator and court in the first half-century after its ratification, indicates that what is protected is an individual right of a private citizen to own and carry firearms in a peaceful manner. | |
| Michael Rivero | The history of war is the history of powerful individuals willing to sacrifice thousands upon thousands of other people’s lives for personal gains. | |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | Anyone who knows history, particularly the history of Europe, will, I think, recognize that the domination of education or of government by any one particular religious faith is never a happy arrangement for the people. | |
| Bertrand Russell | Man has existed for about a million years. He has possessed writing for about 6,000 years, agriculture somewhat longer, but perhaps not much longer. Science, as a dominant factor in determining the belief of educated men, has existed for about 300 years; as a source of economic technique, for about 150 years. In this brief period it has proved itself an incredibly powerful revolutionary force. When we consider how recently it has risen to power, we find ourselves forced to believe that we are at the very beginning of its work in transforming human life. | |
| Willy Russell | I pray that no child of mine would ever descend into such a place as a library. They are indeed most dangerous places and unfortunate is she or he who is lured into such a hellhole of enjoyment, stimulus, facts, passion and fun. | |
| Edward Said | History is written by those who win and those who dominate. | |
| George Santayana | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | |
| George Santayana | Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. | |
| Eric Schaub | Can we truly expect those who aim to exploit us to be trusted to educate us? | |
| John F. Shafroth | Republics are formed only after revolution. The change to the empire is slow and gradual. One of the saddest lessons of history is that whenever these schools of politics have met in the republics of old, the imperial school, with its dazzling influence of wealth and power, has always won. | |
| Ben Shahn | Every great historic change has been based on nonconformity, has been bought either with the blood or with the reputation of nonconformists. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. | |
| George Bernard Shaw | Hegel was right when he said that we learn from history that man can never learn anything from history. | |
| L. Neil Smith | People who object to weapons aren't abolishing violence, they're begging for rule by brute force, when the biggest, strongest animals among men were always automatically 'right.' Guns ended that, and social democracy is a hollow farce without an armed populace to make it work. | |
| Joseph Sobran | In 100 years we have gone from teaching Latin and Greek in high school to teaching Remedial English in college. | |
| Thomas Sowell | Much of the social history of the Western world, over the past three decades, has been a history of replacing what worked with what sounded good. | |
| Thomas Sowell | One of the painfully sobering realizations that come from reading history is the utter incompetence that is possible among leaders of whole nations and empires — and the blind faith that such leaders can nevertheless inspire among the people who are enthralled by their words or their posturing. | |
| Albert Speer | Hitler’s dictatorship differed in one fundamental point from all its predecessors in history. It was the first dictatorship in the present period of modern technical development, a dictatorship which made complete use of all technical means for the domination of its own country. Through technical devices like the radio and the loud-speaker, eighty million people were deprived of independent thought. It was thereby possible to subject them to the will of one man. | |
| Gerry Spence | These are dangerous times. When we are afraid, we want to
be protected, and since we cannot protect ourselves against such
horrors as mass murder by bombers, we are tempted to run to
the government, a government that is always willing to trade the
promise of protection for our freedom, which left, as always,
the question: How much freedom are we willing to relinquish for
such a bald promise?
Already the President was calling for more power, more power
for the FBI. He wanted a thousand more men. And he wanted to
use the army, no less, in situations like Oklahoma City. And he
wanted more power to tap our phones and to invade our privacy.
He wanted express authority from Congress to infiltrate the fringe
groups and, in short, to snoop and to peer and to spy on the
citizenry, especially those who hold different beliefs from those
that flow in the phlegmatic and murky mainstream of America.
But the question remains, will we really be safer with a thousand
more, or even a hundred thousand more FBI agents armed with
even greater power to more easily tap our phone that are already
so easily tapped and to break into our homes that are no longer
safe under the much-mangled exclusionary rule? | |
| Lysander Spooner | If our fathers, in 1776, had acknowledged the principle that a majority had the right to rule the minority, we should never have become a nation; for they were in a small minority, as compared with those who claimed the right to rule over them. | |
| Josef Stalin | One death is a tragedy, but a million deaths are a statistic. | |
| Jimmy Stewart | Liberty's too precious a thing to be buried in history text books. | |
| John Stossel | The history books say that during the Progressive era, government trustbusters reined in business. Nonsense. Progressive 'reforms' -- railroad regulation, meat inspection, drug certification and the rest -- were done at the behest of big companies that wanted competition managed. They knew regulation would burden smaller companies more than themselves. The strategy works. | |
| William Graham Sumner | All history is one long story to this effect: men have struggled for power over their fellow men in order that they might win the joys of earth at the expense of others, might shift the burdens of life from their own shoulders upon those of others. | |
| The Annals of Tacitus | Augustus won over the soldiers with gifts, the populace with cheap corn, and all men with the sweets of repose, and so grew greater by degrees, while he concentrated in himself the functions of the Senate, the magistrates, and the laws. He was wholly unopposed, for the boldest spirits had fallen in battle, or in the proscription, while the remaining nobles, the readier they were to be slaves, were raised the higher by wealth and promotion, so that, aggrandised by revolution, they preferred the safety of the present to the dangerous past. | |
| Hugh Thomas | History suggests that the cause of national decline is, as a rule, that the state in the nation concerned has sought to do too much rather than too little. This applies as much to the Roman Empire as to the Spanish. | |
| Henry David Thoreau | There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root. | |
| William R. Tonso | [T]hroughout history the unarmed have been safe only as long as the armed (criminals or government agents) have allowed them to be safe. We should beware of any politician, bureaucrat, or intellectual who claims the Second Amendment is outdated, or that it does no more than guarantee the National guard’s right to bear arms. Many of these same people did their best to obstruct investigations of government wrongdoing at Ruby Ridge and Waco. | |
| Arnold J. Toynbee | An autopsy of history would show that all great nations commit suicide. | |
| Frederick W. Turner III | History does not exist for us until and unless we dig it up, interpret it, and put it together. Then the past comes alive, or, more accurately, it is revealed for what it has always been - a part of the present. | |
| Bishop Desmond Tutu | We must not allow ourselves to become like the system we oppose. We cannot afford to use methods of which we will be ashamed when we look back, when we say, '...we shouldn't have done that.' We must remember, my friends, that we have been given a wonderful cause. The cause of freedom! And you and I must be those who will walk with heads held high. We will say, 'We used methods that can stand the harsh scrutiny of history.' | |
| Mark Twain | The history of the race, and each individual's experience, are thick with evidence that a truth is not hard to kill and that a lie told well is immortal. | |
| Sir Alex Fraser Tytler | A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. | |
| Sir Alex Fraser Tytler | A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largess of the public treasury. From that time on the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury, with the results that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship....
The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years. These nations have progressed through this sequence: from bondage to spiritual faith; from spiritual faith to great courage; from great courage to liberty; from liberty to abundance; from abundance to selfishness; from selfishness to complacency; from complacency to apathy; from apathy to dependence; from dependency back again to bondage. | |
| Mike Vanderboegh | Anyone who tells you that "It Can't Happen Here" is whistling past the graveyard of history. There is no 'house rule' that bars tyranny coming to America. History is replete with republics whose people grew complacent and descended into imperial butchery and chaos. | |
| Voltaire | History is fables agreed upon. | |
| Ludwig Von Mises | The essential characteristic of Western civilization that distinguishes it from the arrested and petrified civilizations of the East was and is its concern for freedom from the state. The history of the West, from the age of the Greek polis down to the present-day resistance to socialism, is essentially the history of the fight for liberty against the encroachments of the officeholders. | |
| James D. Watson | You know, if you're going to make the next step in a major scientific thing, no one knows how to do it so you have to, in a sense, reject your professors and say, 'They're not getting anywhere, I'm going to try something else.' Crick and I did that at one stage and we're famous practically because we thought that what other people were doing won't get anywhere. | |
| Lynn White, Jr. | History is a means of access to ourselves. | |
| Oscar Wilde | As one reads history, not in the expurgated editions written for schoolboys and passmen, but in the original authorities of each time, one is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalised by the habitual employment of punishment than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime. | |
| Walter E. Williams | Communism and socialism is [sic] seductive. It promises us that people will contribute according to ability and receive according to needs. Everybody is equal. Everybody has a right to decent housing, decent food and affordable medical care. History should have taught us that when we hear people talk this stuff -- watch out! | |
| Woodrow Wilson | Is there any man, is there any woman, let me say any child here
that does not know that the seed of war in the modern world is industrial and commercial rivalry? | |
| Woodrow Wilson | The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government power, not the increase of it. | |
| Albert Wohlstetter | I must confess that the picture of the world that I have presented is unpleasant... If the picture of the world I have drawn is rather bleak, it could nonetheless be cataclysmically worse. | |
| Albert Wohlstetter | We must contemplate some extremely unpleasant possibilities, just because we want to avoid them and achieve something better. Nobody, however, likes to think about anything unpleasant, even to avoid it. And so the crucial problem of thermonuclear war is frequently dispatched with the label 'War is unthinkable' -- which, translated freely, means we don't want to think about it. | |
| Virginia Woolf | The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. | |
| A. Yankee | It is always a part of the misfortunes of the vanquished that their portraits are painted and their history written by the victors. | |
| John Peter Zenger | No nation, ancient or modern, ever lost the liberty of speaking freely, writing, or publishing their sentiments, but forthwith lost their liberty in general and became slaves. | |
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