Historical Quotes - Page 11

Socialism in America will come through the ballot box.

The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.

Nothing is more detestable to the physical anthropologist than... the wretched habit of cremating the dead. It involves not only a prodigal waste of costly fuel and excellent fertilizer, but also the complete destruction of physical historical data. On the other hand, the custom of embalming and mummification is most praiseworthy and highly to be recommended.

Quite honestly, if I were doing work related to a living being or historical being where there was visual or audio recordings available, I would find that extremely difficult because I don't know how you would avoid the process of mimicry. And mimicry, to me at any rate, is a very dull prospect.

For everything is history: What was said yesterday is history, what was said a minute ago is history. But, above all, one is led to misjudge the present, because only the study of historical development permits the weighing and evaluation of the interrelationships among the components of the present-day society.

Well, I actually wrote her a letter a couple of days ago congratulating her. The tone I tried to convey in the letter is, look, you are a part of a great American historical process.

So-called racial characteristics are not really racial at all but are due to the historical experiences of the communities in question.

I can't read historical fiction because I find the real thing so much more interesting.

The broad masses of a population are more amenable to the appeal of rhetoric than to any other force.

Every time some new huckster of angst-ridden metaphor is appointed by Art Forum, the congregation genuflects, stroking the catalog like a handful of Rosary beads, and starts spreading that old gospel according to Hyperbole. No questions asked... And thus the bill of goods is sold, all along the line. An art historical snake, swallowing its own tale.

Some of our greatest historical and artistic treasures we place in museums; others, we take for walks.

Does history record any case in which the majority was right?

The apostolic writings are of three kinds: historical, didactic, and prophetic.

A global economy requires a global currency.

Putin never wanted all of Ukraine. He wanted for historical purposes to take Crimea. He did. Then he wanted a part of Ukraine that he could always use to advance Russian interests. And he is now at a point where nobody in the West is shouting, hey, stop. Give us back Crimea. It's all accepted. And so he has won.

Telling about our lives is important for those who come after as, for those who will see our experience as part of their own historical struggle.

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.

Christianity possesses the great advantage over Judaism of being represented as coming from the mouth of the first Teacher not as a statutory but as a moral religion, and as thus entering into the closest relation with reason so that, through reason, it was able of itself, without historical learning, to be spread at all times and among all peoples with the greatest trustworthiness.

Not only the studying and writing of history but also the honoring of it both represent affirmations of a certain defiant faith - a desperate, unreasoning faith, if you will - but faith nevertheless in the endurance of this threatened world - faith in the total essentiality of historical continuity.

All the many brands of suppression - racism, sexism, heterosexism, ageism, classism - are historical; they have not been always with us. It was not ever thus. And it's not going to be this way, come the revolution!

It is best to erase all personal history because that would make us free from the encumbering thoughts of other people

Pornographers are the enemies of women only because our contemporary ideology of pornography does not encompass the possibility of change, as if we were the slaves of history and not its makers. . . . Pornography is a satire on human pretensions.

The degeneration of the revolution in Russia does not pass from the revolution for communism to the revolution for a developed kind of capitalism, but to a pure capitalist revo­lution. It runs in parallel with world-wide capitalist domination which, by successive steps, eliminates old feudal and Asiatic forms in various zones. While the historical situation in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries caused the capitalist revolution to take liberal forms, in the twentieth century it must have totalitarian and bureaucratic ones.

Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.