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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.more Paul Bede Johnson quotes |
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.more Paul Bede Johnson quotes |
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.more Dr. Samuel Johnson quotes |
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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.more Juvenal quotes |
There is no king who has not had a slave among his ancestors, and no slave who has not had a king among his.more Helen Keller quotes |
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.more Charles F. Kettering quotes |
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.more Charles F. Kettering quotes |
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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.more John Maynard Keynes quotes |
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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.more Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. quotes |
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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.more Paul Krugman quotes |
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.more Robert M. Lafollette, Sr. quotes |
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I think the greatest single enemy is the misuse of information, the perversion of truth in the hands of terribly skillful people.more John le Carré quotes |
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.more C. S. Lewis quotes |
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.more Joseph Lewis quotes |
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.more Abraham Lincoln quotes |
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.more F. J. Lucas quotes |
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?more Peter Lynch quotes |
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.more General Douglas MacArthur quotes |
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.more General Douglas MacArthur quotes |
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.more James Madison quotes |
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.more James Madison quotes |
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.more James Madison quotes |
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.more Clarence Manion quotes |
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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.more Tony Martin quotes |
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.more John E. McLaughlin quotes |
[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.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
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.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
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.more H. L. Mencken quotes |
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.more Frank Straus Meyer quotes |
The historian’s first duties are sacrilege and the mocking of false gods. They are his indispensable instruments for establishing the truth.more Jules Michelet quotes |
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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.more Reverend Martin Niemoeller quotes |
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.more Reverend Martin Niemoeller quotes |
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.more Lyn Nofziger quotes |
We are human and our lot is to learn and to be hurled into inconceivable new worlds.more Novalis quotes |
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.more George Orwell quotes |
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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.more Camille Paglia quotes |
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