BIG QUotes
DEMOCRACY, REASON, TRUTH
“Remember, democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide. It is in vain to say that democracy is less vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious, or less avaricious than aristocracy or monarchy....Those passions are the same in all men, under all forms of simple government, and when unchecked, produce the same effects of fraud, violence, and cruelty....Individuals have conquered themselves. Nations and large bodies of men, never.
--JOHN ADAMS, LETTERS OF JOHN AND ABIGAIL ADAMS
--JOHN ADAMS, LETTERS OF JOHN AND ABIGAIL ADAMS
Democracy can't protect us. We have to protect it.
--BROOKE GLADSTONE, ON THE MEDIA PODCAST, 9/28/18
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of thing
--TALKING HEADS, "CROSSEYED AND PAINLESS," REMAIN IN LIGHT
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no on can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the blinding lights.
--ON TYRANNY, TIMOTHY SNYDER
A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we the best. A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kis put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical." A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well--and wishing that it would do better....A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that is could happen here, but that we will stop it.
--ON TYRANNY, TIMOTHY SNYDER
Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders--presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps...Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chavez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box....There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance....Because there is no single moment--no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution--in which the regime obviously "crosses the line" into dictatorship, nothing may set off society's alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy's erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
--HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE, STEVEN LEVITSKY AND DANIEL ZIBLATT
--BROOKE GLADSTONE, ON THE MEDIA PODCAST, 9/28/18
Facts are simple and facts are straight
Facts are lazy and facts are late
Facts all come with points of view
Facts don't do what I want them to
Facts just twist the truth around
Facts are living turned inside out
Facts are getting the best of them
Facts are nothing on the face of thing
--TALKING HEADS, "CROSSEYED AND PAINLESS," REMAIN IN LIGHT
To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no on can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the blinding lights.
--ON TYRANNY, TIMOTHY SNYDER
A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we the best. A nationalist, "although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge," wrote Orwell, tends to be "uninterested in what happens in the real world." Nationalism is relativist, since the only truth is the resentment we feel when we contemplate others. As the novelist Danilo Kis put it, nationalism "has no universal values, aesthetic or ethical." A patriot, by contrast, wants the nation to live up to its ideals, which means asking us to be our best selves. A patriot must be concerned with the real world, which is the only place where his country can be loved and sustained. A patriot has universal values, standards by which he judges his nation, always wishing it well--and wishing that it would do better....A nationalist will say that "it can't happen here," which is the first step toward disaster. A patriot says that is could happen here, but that we will stop it.
--ON TYRANNY, TIMOTHY SNYDER
Democracies may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders--presidents or prime ministers who subvert the very process that brought them to power. Some of these leaders dismantle democracy quickly, as Hitler did in the wake of the 1933 Reichstag fire in Germany. More often, though, democracies erode slowly, in barely visible steps...Since the end of the Cold War, most democratic breakdowns have been caused not by generals and soldiers but by elected governments themselves. Like Chavez in Venezuela, elected leaders have subverted democratic institutions in Georgia, Hungary, Nicaragua, Peru, the Philippines, Poland, Russia, Sri Lanka, Turkey and Ukraine. Democratic backsliding today begins at the ballot box....There are no tanks in the streets. Constitutions and other nominally democratic institutions remain in place. People still vote. Elected autocrats maintain a veneer of democracy while eviscerating its substance....Because there is no single moment--no coup, declaration of martial law, or suspension of the constitution--in which the regime obviously "crosses the line" into dictatorship, nothing may set off society's alarm bells. Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy's erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.
--HOW DEMOCRACIES DIE, STEVEN LEVITSKY AND DANIEL ZIBLATT
HISTORY
Well-behaved women seldom make history
― LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH
History does not stride along king's highways before moving along side alleys of small peaceful towns.
― MEMORIAL PLAQUE TO JEWISH- POLISH COMMUNITY OF CHMIELNIK, POLAND
History, which is the study of mankind in Time, is often said to teach us nothing. It is certainly a poor guide for snap predictions. Pundits and journalists who wish to know what will happen in the next six months need not bother. Yet time brings change, and change brings the prospect of growth or decay. Everything in the human condition, as in the physical world, is in motion and flux, nothings stands still for long; at any given moment, any given human being or institution is either on the path to its prime or on the road to ruin. For the one thing that History does teach is that all power is transient, all success ephemeral. All states and kingdoms, like all men and women, are mortal. Though some may hope for an exception to the rule, all will pass away. The captains and commissars, who imagine themselves and their systems to be eternal, will sooner or later depart.
--NORMAN DAVIES, HEART OF EUROPE: THE PAST IN POLAND'S PRESENT
History is not the uncovering of absolute truths. It is a dialogue between the present and the past, between communities of scholars and thinkers working to understand the record of what came before — it is always a process of change and revision and critique.
--JAMELLE BOUIE, JOURNALIST (LIBERTY AND SLAVERY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WRAPPED UP WITH EACH OTHER)
Our national histories tell the stories of our ideals and not the stories of those who were excluded or injured by them. These are triumphant and positive stories. But by studying those most marginalized from those ideals--or by those ideals--we learn from their struggle a deeper, more profound meaning of freedom.
--ROGER GRANDE, HISTORY TEACHER
Just as we fight over contemporary political matters, so too we will always fight over history and debate questions like: who should be included in the story? Whose story matters most? What does the past reveal about human behavior? What events are essential for students to know--and what aspects of those events? These questions are continually asked--and the answers we provide probably tells us as much about ourselves, as about the past. So, how we present the past (the practice of history) is actually a subtle explanation of the present.
There is a single truth about what did, and did not, happen--those are facts. It's not always easy to know the facts, but they exist and historians, scientists, journalists and others use tools and methods to obtain facts. However: how people feel about those events, which stories you choose to tell and which facts you employ or exclude to produce those stories, is subject to people’s decisions. That part is debatable. What is less debatable is how we discover the truth. When that process is compromised, our commitment to truth is weakened, and the historical record becomes less reliable and more easily falsified. When truth and fact are less attainable, those in power can better shape what we think, what we know and what we follow and believe. Thus, the study of history, in part, is a means to protect truth and our freedom.
--ROGER GRANDE, HISTORY TEACHER
What historians really do that is different from journalists is journalists uncover the story, but historians understand different ways of looking at patterns and how societies change which is really what we study. And we take the events of anything we study and we try and figure out what created change in that moment. Is it great men? Is it social movements? Is it politics? Is it religion? What create change? When you look at, for example, a law that is in front of Congress or the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, the real question for journalists is 'what happened? Who was where? How did things unfold?' The questions for historians is 'who cares? Why is this particular moment of interest to human beings as they're trying to figure out their world?
--HEATHER COX RICHARDSON (Stay Tuned with Preet, June 3 2021)
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
--NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
--WINSTON CHURCHILL
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
--GEORGE SANTAYANA
History doesn't repeat itself-at best it sometimes rhymes.
--MARK TWAIN
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
--KARL MARX
That men [sic] do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.
--ALDOUS HUXLEY
The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.
--GERDA LERNER, HISTORY
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
--MAYA ANGELOU, POET, MEMOIRIST, NOVELIST
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man [sic] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he [sic] sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
--ROBERT KENNEDY, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL
After the collection of facts, the search for causes.
--HIPPOLYTE TAINE, 19TH CENTURY FRENCH HISTORIAN
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened. -- Peter Berger, Sociologist
--PETER BERGER, SOCIOLOGIST
― LAUREL THATCHER ULRICH
History does not stride along king's highways before moving along side alleys of small peaceful towns.
― MEMORIAL PLAQUE TO JEWISH- POLISH COMMUNITY OF CHMIELNIK, POLAND
History, which is the study of mankind in Time, is often said to teach us nothing. It is certainly a poor guide for snap predictions. Pundits and journalists who wish to know what will happen in the next six months need not bother. Yet time brings change, and change brings the prospect of growth or decay. Everything in the human condition, as in the physical world, is in motion and flux, nothings stands still for long; at any given moment, any given human being or institution is either on the path to its prime or on the road to ruin. For the one thing that History does teach is that all power is transient, all success ephemeral. All states and kingdoms, like all men and women, are mortal. Though some may hope for an exception to the rule, all will pass away. The captains and commissars, who imagine themselves and their systems to be eternal, will sooner or later depart.
--NORMAN DAVIES, HEART OF EUROPE: THE PAST IN POLAND'S PRESENT
History is not the uncovering of absolute truths. It is a dialogue between the present and the past, between communities of scholars and thinkers working to understand the record of what came before — it is always a process of change and revision and critique.
--JAMELLE BOUIE, JOURNALIST (LIBERTY AND SLAVERY HAVE ALWAYS BEEN WRAPPED UP WITH EACH OTHER)
Our national histories tell the stories of our ideals and not the stories of those who were excluded or injured by them. These are triumphant and positive stories. But by studying those most marginalized from those ideals--or by those ideals--we learn from their struggle a deeper, more profound meaning of freedom.
--ROGER GRANDE, HISTORY TEACHER
Just as we fight over contemporary political matters, so too we will always fight over history and debate questions like: who should be included in the story? Whose story matters most? What does the past reveal about human behavior? What events are essential for students to know--and what aspects of those events? These questions are continually asked--and the answers we provide probably tells us as much about ourselves, as about the past. So, how we present the past (the practice of history) is actually a subtle explanation of the present.
There is a single truth about what did, and did not, happen--those are facts. It's not always easy to know the facts, but they exist and historians, scientists, journalists and others use tools and methods to obtain facts. However: how people feel about those events, which stories you choose to tell and which facts you employ or exclude to produce those stories, is subject to people’s decisions. That part is debatable. What is less debatable is how we discover the truth. When that process is compromised, our commitment to truth is weakened, and the historical record becomes less reliable and more easily falsified. When truth and fact are less attainable, those in power can better shape what we think, what we know and what we follow and believe. Thus, the study of history, in part, is a means to protect truth and our freedom.
--ROGER GRANDE, HISTORY TEACHER
What historians really do that is different from journalists is journalists uncover the story, but historians understand different ways of looking at patterns and how societies change which is really what we study. And we take the events of anything we study and we try and figure out what created change in that moment. Is it great men? Is it social movements? Is it politics? Is it religion? What create change? When you look at, for example, a law that is in front of Congress or the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6th, the real question for journalists is 'what happened? Who was where? How did things unfold?' The questions for historians is 'who cares? Why is this particular moment of interest to human beings as they're trying to figure out their world?
--HEATHER COX RICHARDSON (Stay Tuned with Preet, June 3 2021)
History is a set of lies agreed upon.
--NAPOLEON BONAPARTE
History will be kind to me for I intend to write it.
--WINSTON CHURCHILL
Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
--GEORGE SANTAYANA
History doesn't repeat itself-at best it sometimes rhymes.
--MARK TWAIN
History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.
--KARL MARX
That men [sic] do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons that History has to teach.
--ALDOUS HUXLEY
The main thing history can teach us is that human actions have consequences and that certain choices, once made, cannot be undone.
--GERDA LERNER, HISTORY
History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
--MAYA ANGELOU, POET, MEMOIRIST, NOVELIST
It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man [sic] stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he [sic] sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.
--ROBERT KENNEDY, FORMER ATTORNEY GENERAL
After the collection of facts, the search for causes.
--HIPPOLYTE TAINE, 19TH CENTURY FRENCH HISTORIAN
The past is malleable and flexible, changing as our recollection interprets and re-explains what has happened. -- Peter Berger, Sociologist
--PETER BERGER, SOCIOLOGIST
CULTURE AND IDENTITY
Should American nationality be based on shared values, regardless of race, ethnicity and national origin, or should it rest on “blood and soil,” to quote the neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Va.?....Like all monuments, these [Confederate] statues say a lot more about the time they were erected than the historical era they evoke. The great waves of Confederate monument building took place in the 1890s, as...the Jim Crow system was being fastened upon the South, and in the 1920s, the height of black disenfranchisement, segregation and lynching. The statues were part of the legitimation of this racist regime and of an exclusionary definition of America....Historical monuments are, among other things, an expression of power — an indication of who has the power to choose how history is remembered in public places....As all historians know, forgetting is as essential to public understandings of history as remembering. Confederate statues...honor one part of our past. Where are the statues in the former slave states honoring the very large part of the Southern population (beginning with the four million slaves) that sided with the Union rather than the Confederacy? Where are the monuments to the victims of slavery or to the hundreds of black lawmakers who during Reconstruction
--ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN (NY Times)
The image of a sealed, pristine, pure, and uncontaminated culture that ethnic groups typically ascribe to themselves... is contrary not only to all the evidence but to everyday experience. There are no cultural isolates, not in remote jungles, and much less in the cosmopolitan towns of medieval Spain.
--THOMAS GLICK, HISTORIAN
Ethnocentrism is the bane of peoples and of history; that contact of cultures is inevitably creative, however conflictive; and that the mettle of a culture is manifested in its ability to adjust to other cultures without destroying them.
--THOMAS GLICK, HISTORIAN
[Identity] must always be mixed, relational, and inventive.
--JAMES CLIFFORD, THE PREDICAMENT OF CULTURE: TWENTIETH CENTURY ETHNOGRAPHY, LITERATURE AND ART
O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames. My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaa'ba, and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
--'ALI IBN ARABI
--ERIC FONER, HISTORIAN (NY Times)
The image of a sealed, pristine, pure, and uncontaminated culture that ethnic groups typically ascribe to themselves... is contrary not only to all the evidence but to everyday experience. There are no cultural isolates, not in remote jungles, and much less in the cosmopolitan towns of medieval Spain.
--THOMAS GLICK, HISTORIAN
Ethnocentrism is the bane of peoples and of history; that contact of cultures is inevitably creative, however conflictive; and that the mettle of a culture is manifested in its ability to adjust to other cultures without destroying them.
--THOMAS GLICK, HISTORIAN
[Identity] must always be mixed, relational, and inventive.
--JAMES CLIFFORD, THE PREDICAMENT OF CULTURE: TWENTIETH CENTURY ETHNOGRAPHY, LITERATURE AND ART
O Marvel! a garden amidst the flames. My heart has become capable of every form: it is a pasture for gazelles and a convent for Christian monks, and a temple for idols and the pilgrim's Kaa'ba, and the tables of the Torah and the book of the Quran. I follow the religion of Love: whatever way Love's camels take, that is my religion and my faith.
--'ALI IBN ARABI
RACE
I also discovered an unsettling truth that when white Americans frankly peel back the layers of our commingled pasts, we are all marked by it. Whether a company or an individual, we are marred either by our connections to the specific crimes and injuries of our fathers and their fathers. Or we are tainted by the failures of our fathers to fulfill our national credos when their courage was most needed. We are formed in molds twisted by the gifts we received at the expense of others. It is not our "fault." But it is undeniably our inheritance....I had no hand in the horrors perpetrated by...twentieth century slave masters who terrorized American blacks for four generations. But it is nonetheless true that hundreds of millions of us spring from or benefit as a result of lines of descent that abided those crimes and benefited from them.
--DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
“In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.”
― EDUARDO GALEANO, LOS HIJOS DE LOS DIAS
--DOUGLAS A. BLACKMON, SLAVERY BY ANOTHER NAME
“In 1492, the natives discovered they were indians, discovered they lived in America, discovered they were naked, discovered that the Sin existed, discovered they owed allegiance to a King and Kingdom from another world and a God from another sky, and that this God had invented the guilty and the dress, and had sent to be burnt alive who worships the Sun the Moon the Earth and the Rain that wets it.”
― EDUARDO GALEANO, LOS HIJOS DE LOS DIAS