No subscription or hidden extras
Read through the most famous quotes by topic #history
Will history remember us, I wonder? I do hope so - to imagine that one might do something, touch an event somehow, & thereby transcend the bounds of a single human lifetime! ↗
I live in a world where people are guided by limited imagination; only facts that are favorable to them are truths. They are unable to live anyway else. When a person finds out that a fact is against them, it's usually because it's the truth. No one tries to step outside of the edge of reason. No one tries to step beyond the edge of the world. ↗
In the words of a very famous dead person, 'A nation that does not know its history is doomed to do poorly on the Scholastic Aptitude Test. ↗
Perhaps the most dangerous by-product of the Age of Intellect is the unconscious growth of the idea that the human brain can solve the problems of the world. Even on the low level of practical affairs this is patently untrue. Any small human activity, the local bowls club or the ladies’ luncheon club, requires for its survival a measure of self-sacrifice and service on the part of the members. In a wider national sphere, the survival of the nation depends basically on the loyalty and self‑sacrifice of the citizens. The impression that the situation can be saved by mental cleverness, without unselfishness or human self-dedication, can only lead to collapse. ↗
There were, of course, other heroes, little ones who did little things to help people get through: merchants who let profits disappear rather than lay off clerks, store owners who accepted teachers' scrip at face value not knowing if the state would ever redeem it, churches that set up soup kitchens, landlords who let tenants stay on the place while other owners turned to cattle, housewives who set out plates of cold food (biscuits and sweet potatoes seemed the fare of choice) so transients could eat without begging, railroad "bulls" who turned the other way when hoboes slipped on and off the trains, affluent families that carefully wrapped leftover food because they knew that residents of "Hooverville" down by the dump would be scavenging their garbage for their next meal, and more, an more. But they were not enough, could not have been enough, so when the government stepped in to help, those needing help we're thankful. ↗
Arendt, as we have seen, is committed to understanding totalitarianism in its complete novelty, as an unprecedented phenomenon. It is unprecedented in the strict sense that it does not just represent a novel variation with respect to the categories defining forms of government that we have long held… historically, mankind ‘even in its darkest periods, granted the slain enemy the right to be remembered, as a self-evident acknowledgment of the fact that we are all men’ (Arendt 1968a: 452). What was attempted in the camps was neither punishment nor persecution but obliteration, such that even death was robbed of its meaning, ‘making martyrdom, for the first time in history, impossible. ↗
