History Quotes - Page 50

Whoever heard of such a mixture of languages in one army, since there were French, Flemings, Frisians, Gauls, Sayonards, Lotharingians, Allemani, Bavarians, Normans, English, Scots, Aquitanians, Italians, Danes, Apulians, Iberians, Bretons, Greeks and Armenians.

World history is tragic.

This war, disguise it as they may, is virtually nothing more or less than perpetual slavery against universal freedoms.

Vichy proves one thing: if you don't want to know how low your fellow citizens can fall, and crawl, don't lose a war.

For a long time in American history, people didn't even come up before the Senate. They didn't come before the Judiciary Committee, and up until about 1923, something like that.

Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces, with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.

History - that little sewer where man loves to wallow.

We cannot adopt the way of living that was satisfactory a hundred years ago. The world in which we live has changed, and we must change with it.

Any general statement is like a check drawn on a bank. Its value depends on what is there to meet it.

It takes at least three trees to make a row, and it needs at least three facts to make a truth.

There is nothing truer than myth: history, in its attempt to realize myth, distorts it, stops halfway; when history claims to have succeeded, this is nothing but humbug and mystification. Everything we dream is realizable. Reality does not have to be: it is simply what it is.

The trial of Ernst Zundel has gone down in Canadian history.

History within itself cannot be transcended. ... In history itself there are only relative victories.

The first humans to come to Canada were the Indians. There is some mystery as to where the Indians came from. Some experts say that they came from the same place as the Eskimo. This doesn't help much because nobody knows where the Eskimo came from either. (Except the Eskimo, and they aren't talking.)

The game of history is usually played by the best and the worst over the heads of the majority in the middle.

History ... with its long, leisurely, gentlemanly labors, the books arriving by post, the cards to be kept and filed, the sections to be copied, the documents to be checked, is the ideal pursuit for the New England mind.

To walk into history is to be free at once, to be at large among people.

Instead of pressing, with the foremost of the crowd, into the palace of Constantinople, Libanius calmly expected his arrival at Antioch; withdrew from court on the first symptoms of coldness and indifference; required a formal invitation for each visit; and taught his sovereign an important lesson, that he might command the obedience of a subject, but that he must deserve the attachment of a friend.

On the slightest touch the unsupported fabric of their pride and power fell to the ground. The expiring senate displayed a sudden lustre, blazed for a moment, and was extinguished for ever.

Truth, naked, unblushing truth, the first virtue of all serious history, must be the sole recommendation of this personal narrative.

Augustus was sensible that mankind is governed by names; nor was he deceived in his expectation, that the senate and people would submit to slavery, provided they were respectfully assured that they still enjoyed their ancient freedom.

The brutal soldiers satisfied their sensual appetites without consulting either the inclination or the duties of their female captives; and a nice question of casuistry was seriously agitated, Whether those tender victims, who had inflexibly refused their consent to the violation which they sustained, had lost, by their misfortune, the glorious crown of virginity. There were other losses indeed of a more substantial kind and more general concern.

The Romans, who so coolly and so concisely mention the acts of justice which were exercised by the legions, reserve their compassion and their eloquence for their own sufferings, when the provinces were invaded and desolated by the arms of the successful Barbarians.

In a sense, words are encyclopedias of ignorance because they freeze perceptions at one moment in history and then insist we continue to use these frozen perceptions when we should be doing better.

History is principally the inaccurate narration of events which ought not to have happened.