1,795 quotes found
“All interpretations of history are propaganda for one idea or another.”
“I knew that a historian (or a journalist, or anyone telling a story) was forced to choose, out of an infinite number of facts, what to present, what to omit. And that decision inevitably would refl...”
“It appears history is going to keep happening, despite our hopes for retirement.”
“All dreams of empire end because day breaks in the hearts of the slaves used to build it.”
“Hay que ser duro pero jamas perder la ternura.[It is necessary to be hard but never to lose the tenderness]”
“Either that information was not believed or inexplicably never passed on to the regional military command. When the attack finally came, Vienamese civilians were defenseless.”
“Forms have changed through the centuries in obedience to the external world to which all forms belong.”
“...the Bush administration may, in future years, be remembered 'for bringing peace to the Middle East' (as Condoleezza Rice has pronounced). History may be the mother of truth, but it can also give...”
“It is undoubtedly true that religion is often socially conservative. By binding a people together under a shared God, a common cosmology and a common morality, religion creates order and stability ...”
“...they all were, in the grip of a huge fantasy: the idea that men would not be judged by who they once were and what they had once done, if they only decided to be different. They wanted to step a...”
“In the beginning was the Word. Then came the fucking word processor. Then came the thought processor. Then came the death of literature. And so it goes.”
“The enjoyment of power inevitably corrupts the judgement of reason, and perverts its liberty.”
“That things are "status quo" is the catastrophe.”
“After twelve centuries, a little hope had come into the world - and then came an illiterate prince to ride roughshod over it with a barbarian horde and...”
“Dynasties rise and fall according to what the Chinese used to call the mandate of heaven, but life for the peasant changes little.”
“Andrei Yanuaryevich (one longs to blurt out, Jaguaryevich) Vyshinsky, availing himself of the most flexible dialectics (of a sort nowadays not permitted either Soviet citizens or electronic calcula...”
“Historians are interested in ideas not only because they influence societies, but because they reveal the societies that give rise to them.”
“Armour belonging to someone else either chops off you or weighs you down or is too tight”
“Nineteenth-century liberalism had assumed that man was a rational being who operated naturally according to his own best interests, so that in the end, what was reasonable would prevail. On this pr...”
“History is gossip that's been legitimized, and that's really the case when you get into some of the Roman historians. Wow! They'd be right at home on reality tv.”
