history49 quotes

“We live in a world that depends for its economic survival on the constant adoption and consumption of new things. Archaeology, history, genealogy, and prayer are the overflowing drawers into which we throw our thoughts of earlier generations.”

“When you look in the mirror you see not just your face but a museum. Although your face, in one sense, is your own, it is composed of a collage of features you have inherited from your parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and so on. The lips and eyes that either bother or please you are not yours alone but are also features of your ancestors, long dead perhaps as individuals but still very much alive as fragments in you. Even complex qualities such as your sense of balance, musical abilities, shyness in crowds, or susceptibility to sickness have been lived before. We carry the past around with us all the time, and not just in our bodies. It lives also in our customs, including the way we speak. The past is a set of invisible lenses we wear constantly, and through these we perceive the world and the world perceives us. We stand always on the shoulders of our ancestors, whether or not we look down to acknowledge them.”

“Very strange bridges are used to make the passage from one state of things to another; we may lose sight of them in our surveys of general history, but their discovery is the glory of historical research. History is not the study of origins; rather it is the analysis of all the mediations by which the past was turned into our present.”

“Every mythology remembers the innocence of the first state: Adam in the Garden, the peaceful Hyperboreans, the Uttar-akurus or ‘the Men of Perfect Virtue’ of the Taoists. Pessimists often interpret the story of the Golden Age as a tendency to turn our backs on the ills of the present, and sigh for the happiness of youth. But nothing in Hesiod’s text exceeds the bounds of probability.

The real or half-real tribes which hover on the fringe of ancient geographies—Atavantes, Fenni, Parrossits or the dancing Spermatophagi—have their modern equivalents in the Bushman, the Shoshonean, the Eskimo and the Aboriginal.

One characteristic of the Men of the Golden Age: they are always remembered as migratory.”

“I quit my job in the ‘art world’ and went back to the dry places: alone, travelling light. The names of the tribes I travelled among are unimportant: Rguibat, Quashgai, Taimanni, Turkomen, Bororo, Tuareg—people whose journeys, unlike my own, had neither beginning nor end. I slept in black tents, blue tents, skin tents, yurts of felt and windbreaks of thorns. One night, caught in a sandstorm in the Western Sahara, I understood Muhammed’s dictum, ‘A journey is a fragment of Hell.’

The more I read, the more convinced I became that nomads had been the crankhandle of history, if for no other reason than that the great monotheisms had, all of them, surfaced from the pastoral milieu...”

“At the beginning, then, globalization was a Communist idea. Today, it finally seems to be coming to fruition by means of liberalism. Put another way, history’s real irony is that globalization is being realized by the opponents of those who initially proposed it.”

“The conservatives who fear developments that they believe will ignore indelible aspects of the human condition would gain by attending to history and geography before they claim to know what mankind is, for the forms that the human enterprise has taken are sometimes more varied than they might think. But the followers of progress would do well to learn their own history and geography before legitimizing and legalizing any social development, for the forms of human existence are more coherent than they think, and they risk reestablishing archetypes that contradict their own points of reference.”

“The lesson of the twentieth century is the following: we have limits that we do not choose, and which it would be in our interest to accept rather than suppress, given the damage attempts at suppression have caused.”

“Is it not late? A late time to be living? Are not our generations the crucial ones? For we have changed the world. Are not our heightened times the important ones? For we have nuclear bombs. Are we not especially significant because our century is?—our century and its unique Holocaust, its refugee populations, its serial totalitarian exterminations; our century and its antibiotics, silicon chips, men on the moon, and spliced genes? No, we are not and it is not. These times of ours are ordinary times, a slice of life like any other. Who can bear to hear this, or who will consider it?”

“There were no formerly heroic times, and there was no formerly pure generation. There is no one here but us chickens, and so it has always been: a people busy and powerful, knowledgeable, ambivalent, important, fearful, and self-aware; a people who scheme, promote, deceive, and conquer; who pray for their loved ones, and long to flee misery and skip death. It is a weakening and discoloring idea, that rustic people knew God personally once upon a time— or even knew selflessness or courage or literature—but that it is too late for us. In fact, the absolute is available to everyone in every age. There never was a more holy age than ours, and never a less.”

“Since wealth is an order and procedure of production and exchange rather than an accumulation of (mostly perishable) goods, and is a trust (the ‘credit system’) in men and institutions rather than in the intrinsic value of paper money or checks, violent revolutions do not so much redistribute wealth as destroy it. There may be a redivision of the land, but the natural inequality of men soon re-creates an inequality of possessions and privileges, and raises to power a new minority with essentially the same instincts as in the old. The only real revolution is in the enlightenment of the mind and the improvement of character, the only real emancipation is individual, and the only real revolutionists are philosophers and saints.”

“To those of us who study history not merely as a warning reminder of man’s follies and crimes, but also any encouraging remembrance of generative souls, the past ceases to be a depressing chamber of horrors; it becomes a celestial city, a spacious country of the mind, wherein a thousand saints, statesmen, inventors, scientists, poets, artists, musicians, lovers, and philosophers still live and speak, teach and carve and sing. The historian will not mourn because he can see no meaning in human existence except that which man puts into it; let it be our pride that we ourselves may put meaning into our lives, and sometimes a significance that transcends death. If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.”

“Other studies may tell us how we might behave, or how we should behave; history tells us how we have behaved for six thousand years. One who knows that record is in large measure protected in advance against the delusions and disillusionments of his times. He has learned the limitations of human nature, and bears with equanimity the faults of his neighbors and the imperfections of states. He shares hopefully in the reforming enterprises of his age and people; but his heart does not break, nor his faith in life fade out, when he perceives how modest are the results, and how persistently man remains what he has been for sixty centuries, perhaps for a thousand generations.”

“History is a predicament for man who must live in it. In order to act in history, he must seek to rise above it. He needs perspectives in terms of which to understand his situation, and timeless truths and values in terms of which to act in it. Yet the perspectives which he finds often merely reflect his age; and what he accepts as timelessly true and value is apt to be merely the opinion that is in fashion. Thus while man must always try to rise above his historical situation he succeeds at best only precariously.”

“As a construct, history is too often revised to match contemporary views. It has been said that each generation must rewrite history in order to understand it. The opposite is true. Moderns revise history to make it palatable, not to understand it. Those who edit ‘history’ to popular taste each decade will never understand the past—neither the horrors nor glories of which the human race is equally capable—and for that reason, they will fail to understand themselves.”

“Bowie, born somewhere in the South in the 1790’s, was raised in a family that became wealthy in Louisiana early in the century. He roamed, running slaves with Jean Lafitte in contravention to what every Southerner felt was a stupid law, exploring Texas, fighting Indians. Bowie was remarkable in two respects. He fitted in easily with the best society of the Creole towns and vast plantations, and he had the enormous respect of the wildest and toughest men on the harshest of all American frontiers. He was a killer: he killed the son of Jean Lafitte, who crossed him, crippled ‘Bloody’ Sturdivant, gutted Major Norris Wright and a verified number of others, in the most desperate ‘medleys’ or duels. He made the great knife his brother Rezin forged for him a glittering legend; soon Bowie knives were manufactured in England for sale on the American frontier. Yet Bowie was simply not a killer in the modern, civilized sense. He lived in a violent society, and men of keen judgement and good breeding considered him quite sound. The respect tendered him far exceeded that of any duelist.”

“Codes tend to live on in debased form, often long after the necessity that called them forth is dead.”

“Every age has a people or a culture that believes the shortest distance between dreams and goals is a bomb, a bullet, a gas oven, or a keen Toledo sword and burning stake.”

“Historically, the better organized and more powerful always became dominant, whatever their philosophy.”

“In all times and in all places there were only three ways by which greatly differentiated peoples had lived together: as slave or serf and master; by miscegenation; or by some system of caste. The first and the last solutions, historically, were commonest; they had been employed from the New World to India. The Spanish, in America, had imposed a combination of the two, with considerable miscegenation on the side.”

“It is a valid question, whether the long frontier shaped Anglo-America, or whether attitudes, prejudices, and ethics brought from Europe shaped the American frontier.”

“Texas was never a refuge for the lowly, or oppressed, or a beacon proclaiming human rights. It was a primordial land with a Pleistocene climate, inhabited by species inherently hostile to the Anglo-Celtic breed. Some North Americans chose to conquer it, and in the process unquestionably came to look upon themselves as a sort of chosen race.

This sense of being a chosen people, which was tribal and biblical, was an enormous Texan strength rather than a weakness. It gave Anglo-Texans immediate moral superiority, in action, over their enemies. It led to high nobility and at times a valor almost beyond belief. It also produced brutal prejudice, and ethnic self-satisfaction that amounted to chauvinism. The whole feeling was guileless, and therefore guiltless. Hypocrisy toward warfare was never part of the Texan ethos. The generations that moved across the Sabine were already bred to certain hatreds and war.”

“The prescription I’ve come to seems to be this. Know the heaven and earth that were, but experience the world that is.”

“Science confines itself to the measurable or quantitative aspect of things and excludes what is not measurable, individual, or unique. History deals with the individual and the unique, but it is abstract because it postulates an objective series of facts and events wholly independent of the historian and it never arrives at a complete explanation of anything. And practical thinking is condemned to an endless ‘ought to be’ that never finds rest in a stable ‘is’.

The primary conclusion that follows from all this is that scientific, historical, and practical thinking have nothing to contribute to political philosophy, nor can they criticize its conclusions.”

“A human being is not a waxen rubbing, a lifeless imprint taken from some great stony face. Rather he is a Minuteman or a dog soldier at liberty to use the inclinations of the past as he sees fit. He is free to perceive the matrix, and, within his limits, change from it. By seeing both the futility in trying to relive the old life and the danger in trying to obliterate it, man can gain the capacity to make anew. His very form depends not on repetition but upon variation from old patterns. In response to stress, biological survival requires genetic change; it necessitates a turning away from doomed replication. And what of history? Was it different?”

“Die Eule der Minerva beginnt erst mit der einbrechenden Dämmerung ihren Flug.

The owl of Minerva first begins her flight with the onset of dusk.”

“When we contemplate this display of passions and the consequences of their violence, the unreason which is associated not only with them, but even—rather we might say especially— with good designs and righteous aims; when we see arising therefrom the evil, the vice, the ruin that has befallen the most flourishing kingdoms which the mind of man ever created, we can hardly avoid being filled with sorrow at this universal taint of corruption...But in contemplating history as the slaughter-bench at which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed, a question necessarily arises: To what principle, to what final purpose, have these monstrous sacrifices been offered?”

“Napoleon’s contradictory interventions showed that rights need not be seen as forming a single package. He introduced religious toleration and equal civil and political rights for religious minorities wherever he ruled. Yet at home in France, he severely limited everyone’s freedom of speech and basically eliminated freedom of the press. The French emperor believed that ‘Men are not born to be free...Liberty is a need felt by a small class of people whom nature has endowed with nobler minds than the mass of men. Consequently, it may be repressed with impunity. Equality, on the other hand, pleases the masses.’ The French did not desire true liberty, in his view; they simply aspired to rise to the top of society. They would sacrifice their political rights in order to ensure their legal equality.”

“Ironically, then, the very notion of human rights inadvertently opened the door to more virulent forms of sexism, racism, and anti-Semitism. In effect, the sweeping claims about the natural equality of all mankind called forth equally global assertions about natural difference, producing a new kind of opponent to human rights, more powerful and sinister even than the traditionalist ones. The new forms of racism, anti-Semitism, and sexism offered biological explanations for the naturalness of human difference. In the new racism, Jews were not just Christ-killers, their inherent racial inferiority threatened to stain the purity of whites through intermarriage. Blacks were no longer inferior because they were slaves; even as the abolition of slavery progressed around the globe, racism became more, not less, poisonous. Women were not simply less reasonable than men because they were less educated; their biology destined them to the private, domestic life and made them entirely unsuitable for politics, business, or the professions. In these new biological doctrines, education or changes in environment could never change the inherent hierarchical structures in human nature.”

“The everyday worlds of our ancestors may have been smaller in terms of space and shorter in time, their horizons narrower than our own. Their lives could end at any moment. But these physical limits—the next hill and the edge of a great and dense forest, as well as death and dying—weren’t the same as real boundaries and the end of life. In terms of space and time their worlds reached much further than this. For they did not always have to keep their eyes on the ground or their gaze on the next mountain or the edge of the forest. They could also turn their gaze boldly (or perhaps anxiously) upward to the Sun and the Moon, the stars and the planets, the rain clouds and storms that were approaching. For present life in a peasant world, all of this was certainly of greater importance than the question of who lived on the other side of the next mountain or forest. Likewise, death and dying were accepted as a natural and understandable break, as a passage, but this in no way distracted the view of what was to come: continuation of life everlasting.”

“There were a multitude of these little worlds in the past… It should be obvious at this point that there was no typical single farm or community. In the same way that every life course was unique and colorful, different from any other at the time in ways that are not the case today, so it was with every piece of property, every farm, and every community. What was typical was the colorful mosaic-like quality of life: the richness and multiplicity of possibilities, the lack of uniformity.”

“At the core of every moral code there is a picture of human nature, a map of the universe, and a version of history. To human nature (of the sort conceived), in a universe (of the kind imagined), after a history (so understood), the rules of the code apply.”

“To ask earnestly the question of the ultimate meaning of history takes ones breath away; it transports us to a vacuum which only hope and faith can fill.”

“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past.”

“If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he have not done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes. This you see here, these ruins wondered at by tribes of savages, do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again. With other people, with other sons.”

“The reverence attached to the artifacts of history is a thing men feel. One could even say that what endows any thing with significance is solely the history in which it has participated. Yet wherein does that history lie?”

“For the longest period of which we are at present aware, for hundreds of thousands of years in the Paleolithic, humans walked around, like healthy animals, in a state that we would today call religious delirium, but which is in fact the default state of all conscious and semi-conscious life. For long after the coming of civilization also, many continued in this condition, or did so during special times of the year or festivals when man could regain his free and natural state. It was civilization and in particular agricultural civilization that forbad this condition and plunged the majority of humans into a semi-permanent repressive or depressive frame. That this is consistent with, and even a prerequisite for, the impressive works and development of higher civilization and higher culture shouldn’t be surprising: the majority of mankind suffered terribly also in their bodies from the coming of agriculture, the backbreaking labor, the malnourishment that shows itself in the smaller stature and more slender build of farmer’s skeletons, of the destruction of their teeth, the atrophy of their brains and other organs. Agriculture allowed a steady food source, an increase in numbers, and above all the maintenance of an elite, free from these exactions, that lived parasitically on the many. But agriculture broke the human animal and domesticated him. Do you understand then what the ‘disenchanted’ worldview is? I have to laugh at the ‘secular worldview,’ the disenchanted worldview, which is fact the worldview or mood of the broken peasant farmer.”

“Guided by the Spirit, the People of God come to recognize in cultural and social transformations both the signs of the presence of Christ, who comes and guides history toward its fulfilment, and those aberrations that obscure his face. In this way, the essential core of revealed Truth is not altered, but made explicit and adopted as a living standard for guiding concrete choices,

inspiring paths of personal and communal conversion, promoting structural reforms and supporting new forms of evangelical witness in public life. History is thus understood as one of the places in which the Church allows herself to be taught by the Spirit about the humanizing power of the Gospel; and she learns to develop her own teaching at the service of the dignity of every person and the good of all peoples.”

“No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.”

“Human beings make a radical distinction, of course, between the past and future, and they know in their hearts that the future can be changed, whereas the past cannot be. But they also know in their hearts that the future is unknowable but the past is knowable, and there’s a conflict, a natural division among human beings between those who are interested in changing things and those who are interested in knowing things. Among the latter, of course, are conservatives—those who want to know about their condition and know it by looking at the past and seeing what in the past is useful and valuable and what is not. That backward-looking attitude is fundamental to us. But of course, it isn’t about changing things, it’s about understanding them; whereas the left has this emphasis on the future, always, because the future can be changed. The only problem with it is that we don’t know how to do it and the evidence of history is that when we think we know how to do it, we will always make it worse.”

“There were depths, but the soundings were few.”

“Every struggle to overcome a problem has its own logical technique. There is a technique of the painter’s brush-strokes, of horsemanship, of navigating an airship. Always it is a matter of purposive activity, never of things. And it is just this that is so often overlooked in the study of prehistory, in which far too much attention is paid to things in museums and far too little to the innumerable processes that must have been in existence, even though they may have vanished without leaving a trace.”

“Far from legitimizing the historicist inference, history seems rather to prove that all human thought, and certainly all philosophic thought, is concerned with the same fundamental themes or the same fundamental problems, and therefore that there exists an unchanging framework which persists in all changes of human knowledge of both facts and principles. This inference is obviously compatible with the fact that clarity about these problems, the approach to them, and the suggested solutions differ more or less from thinker to thinker or from age to age.”

“The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.”

“Disaster is rarely as pervasive as it seems from recorded accounts. The fact of being on the record makes it appear continuous and ubiquitous whereas it is more likely to have been sporadic both in time and place. Besides, persistence of the normal is usually greater than the effect of the disturbance, as we know from our own times. After absorbing the news of today, one expects to face a world consisting entirely of strikes, crimes, power failures, broken water mains, stalled trains, school shutdowns, muggers, drug addicts, neo-Nazis, and rapists. The fact is that one can come home in the evening—on a lucky day—without having encountered more than one or two of these phenomena. This has led me to formulate Tuchman’s Law, as follows: ‘The fact of being reported multiplies the apparent extent of any deplorable development by five- to tenfold’ (or any figure the reader would care to supply).”

“If a nation cannot face its past, it has no future.”

“History is the world of experience abridged by the category of the past. Science is experience conceptualized quantitatively. Practice is experience abstracted in terms of will.”

“Whenever I am thinking of a character, in public life it may be, or in literature, I always ask ‘What was happening in the world when he was twenty?’ If I am thinking of a year, the question is ‘Who were in their forties then?’ To the twenties I go for the shaping of ideas not fully disclosed: to the forties for the handling of things already established.”

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should in live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”