1,795 quotes found
“Since history is not an objective reality, but only an imaginative reconstruction of vanished events, the pattern that appears useful and agreeable to one generation is never entirely so to the next.”
“Physics advances by accepting absurdities. Its history is one of unbelievable ideas proving to be true.”
“The student of history knows no more refreshing recreation than that of nailing liars, like vermin, to the wall.”
“Selfrighteous creates wars more often than other reasons.”
“History was a way to live extra lives, to cheat the limits of flesh and blood, to roll the rock back from the tomb and free the resurrected dead.”
“In many cases where one is content to lead a secluded life it is not necessary to say much of one's past, but as a rule something must be said. People have the habit of inquiringif they are no more...”
“Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It i...”
“We know only that in some strange and melancholy way we have become a waste land. All the same, we are not often sad.”
“Rising up, rising down! History shambles on! What are we left with? A few half-shattered Greek stelae; Trotsky's eyeglasses; Gandhi's native-spun cloth, Cortes' pieces of solid gold (extorted from ...”
“The war which is comingIs not the first one. There wereOther wars before it.When the last one came to an endThere were conquerors and conquered.Among the conquered the common peopleStarved. Among t...”
“I have heard ballads of great battles, and poems about the beauty of a charge and the grace of a leader. But I did not know that war was nothing more than butchery, as savage and unskilled as stick...”
“Delight in smooth sounding platitudes, refusal to face unpleasant facts ... genuine love of peace and pathetic belief that love can be its sole foundation ... the utter devotion of the Liberals to ...”
“Whoever won the war, would revise the history.”
“The thing people don't understand about an army is its great, unpunctuated wastes of inaction: you have to scavenge for food, you are camped out somewhere with a rising water level because your mad...”
“When facing a decision that stands a 50/50 chance of being correct, the choice made will be wrong 80% of the time. Rick Coxen”
“Through the dense din, I say, we heard him shout"I see your lights!" But ours had long died out.”
“She had always assumed that her life would end inside the war, that the war itself would be her eternal present, as it was for Darrow and for her brother. The possibility of time going on, her memo...”
“The actual truth has never written about any war, and this will be no exception.”
“History is a symptom of our disease”
“They say it is a wide road that leads to war and only a narrow path that leads home again.”
