22 quotes found
“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
“Most the power of authoritarianism is freely given.”
“The vast majority of Jews killed in the Holocaust never saw a concentration camp.”
“In the politics of the every day, our words and gestures, or their absence, count very much.”
“Other forces were at work besides conformism. But without the conformists, the great atrocities would have been impossible.”
“No major war or act of mass killing in the twentieth century began without the aggressors or perpetrators first claiming innocence and victimhood.”
“Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectac...”
“Like Hitler, the President used the word lies to mean statements of fact not to his liking and presented journalism as a campaign against himself.”
“Both of these positions, inevitability and eternity, are antihistorical. The only thing that stands between them is history itself. History allows us to see patterns and make judgments. It sketches...”
“Life is political, not because the world cares about how you feel, but because the world reacts to what you do. The minor choices we make are a kind of vote, making it more or less likely that free...”
“The whole notion of disruption is adolescent: It assumes that after the teenagers make a mess, the adults will come and clean it up. But there are no adults. We own this mess.”
“History permits us to be responsible: not for everything, but for something... History gives us the company of those who have done and suffered more than we have.”
“The American and British soldiers who liberated the dying inmates from camps in Germany believed that they had discovered the horrors of Nazism. The images their photographers and cameramen capture...”
“The European history of the twentieth century shows us that societies can break, democracies can fall, ethics can collapse, and ordinary men can find themselves standing over death pits with guns i...”
“Politicians in our times feed their clichs to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the success...”
“It is less appealing, but morally more urgent, to understand the actions of the perpetrators. The moral danger, after all, is never that one might become a victim but that one might be a perpetrato...”
“...But this number, like all the others, must be seen not as 5.7 million, which is an abstraction few of us can grasp, but as 5.7 million times one. This does not mean some generic image of a Jew p...”
“How could a large land empire thrive and dominate in the modern world without reliable access to world markets and without much recourse to naval power?Stalin and Hitler had arrived at the same bas...”
“Now we will live! This is what the hungry little boy liked to say, as he toddled along the quiet roadside, or through the empty fields. But the food that he saw was only in his imagination. The whe...”
“Stalin had developed an interesting new theory: that resistance to socialism increases as its successes mount, because its foes resist with greater desperation as they contemplate their final defea...”
