Perspective Quotes - Page 8

The number of people killed by the sanctions in Iraq is greater than the total number of people killed by all weapons of mass destruction in all of history.

A fat man eating quails while children are begging for bread is a disgusting sight, but you are less likely to see it when you are within the sound of the guns.

A fantastically huge, roiling cloud, glowing bluish gray, swaggered over the city. It was more than three miles tall. Below it Hiroshima was boiling.

Life is a work of art, and what you see depends on your perspective.

Anytime you meditate, some electric jerks occur in your thigh...the symbol of premonition of an unpleasant event that has happened or will take place in future.

Perspective seasons meaning with sprinkles of time.

Eurocentrism is quite simply the colonizer's model of the world.

History looks queer when you're standing close to it, watching where it is coming from and how it's being made.

The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient; the work of progress so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble; the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual so brief, that we often see only the ebb of the advancing wave and are thus discouraged. It is history that teaches us to hope.

The present state of the world is normal; it with the last (19th) century that with the abnormality.

Leo Strauss's discoveries in the history of political philosophy had the effect of liberating his students from the yoke of contemporary thought.

Plato dramatically puts the detachment of the philosopher from his time this way: to philosophize is to prepare to die.

Our view of history diminishes the reality of the past. We concentrate on the historic event as something that has happened, and in so doing we ignore it as a moment which, at the time, is happening.

You don't realize your story is changing you until you look back.

For the Arab, the past does not merely live. The past defines the present.

I wrote this book because I had formed a strong impression that the people currently living were paying insufficient attention to the dead.

The dead outnumber the living fourteen to one, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril

Historians are not scientists. They cannot (and should not even trying to) establish universal laws of social or political "physics" with reliable predictive powers. Why? Because there is no possibility of repeating the single, multi-millennium experiment that constant to the past. The sample size of human history is one.

History is the preceptor of prudence, not principles.

With improved historical records, and easier access to them, we actually have better reasons for hating one another, for anger and violence toward one another.