History Quotes - Page 19

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.

Hay que ser duro pero jamas perder la ternura.

[It is necessary to be hard but never to lose the tenderness]

Očevidno je da ne postoji nikakav smisao povijesti koji bi se dao spasiti leđima okrenutim prema Auschwitzu niti postoji Bog kojemu se čovjek može klanjati leđa okrenutih prema Auschwitzu. Kao teološko-politička katastrofa Auschwitz ne ostavlja pošteđenima niti kršćanstvo i njegovu teologiju niti društvo i njegovu politiku.

When considering a candidate for office, almost right up until they enter the polling booth and sometimes even in the booth itself, most voters rely more on what they see and hear themselves in real time than on facts, history, logic, or learned experience.

...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 birth to illegitimate children.

Successful revolutions are those which end up by erasing all traces of themselves.

Well-lit streets discourage sin, but don't overdo it.

I am an anarch in space, a metahistorian in time. Hence I am committed to neither the political present nor tradition; I am blank and also open and potent in any direction.

Dear old Dad, in contrast, still pours his wine into the same decaying old wineskins, he still believes in a constitution when nothing and no one constitutes anything.

Geography should be the ultimate deciding factor for every political dilemma for proximity to an ailing land is bound to result in one’s infection.

Harry was a bright boy. And like many bright boys, he had a little mischief in him.

By turning names into things we create false models of reality. By endowing nations, societies or cultures, with the qualities of internally homogeneous and externally distinctive bounded objects, we create a model of the world as a global pool hall in which the entities spin off each other line so many hard and round billiard balls

The NHS will last as long as there are folk left with faith to fight for it

Then none was for a party;
Then all were for the state;
Then the great man helped the poor,
And the poor man loved the great;
Then lands were fairly proportioned;
Then spoils were fairly sold;
The Romans were like brothers
In the brave days of old.

Military strategy...has become the diplomacy of violence.

Well, in war, you can only be killed once. But in politics, many times.

Politics is always related to the history and genealogy.

Remaking the world wasn't always a stage show and a cheering crowd. Politics was just warfare by other means. The losers didn't get to hold rallies.

In the long run, even a tyrannical government only has the power that the people confer on it and coming to understand history is the beginning of making things right.

Europeans would like to escape from their history, a "great" history written in letters of blood. But others, by the hundreds of millions, are taking it up for the first time, or coming back to it.

The few surviving Armenians no longer ask to go home. They do not ask for restitution. They ask simply to have the memory of their obliteration acknowledged. It is a moral obsession, the lonely legacy passed onto the third and fourth generation who no longer speak Armenian but who carry within them the seeds of resentment that will not be quashed.