#history

It is my opinion that human history can make no sense unless evil doings are recognized for what they are, and that they are bearable only if somehow they may be redeemed. ↗

— Simon Conway Morris

#doings #evil #history #human #human history

That so unlikely an outcome should accrue to a man possessed of such limited talent and so many flaws, and one lacking in a sense of ethics and decency was one of the bitter ironies of history. ↗

— William Thomas Green Morton

#decency #ethics #flaws #history #ironies

I will be the first woman president of Mexico in history. ↗

— Josefina Vazquez Mota

#first #history #i #mexico #president

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that. ↗

— Malcolm Muggeridge

#constantly #evil #history #our #our time

I'm a history nut. ↗

— Billy Joel

#i #nut

When we no longer look at an organic being as a savage looks at a ship, as at something wholly beyond his comprehension; when we regard every production of nature as one which has had a history; when we contemplate every complex structure and instinct as the summing up of many contrivances, each useful to the possessor, nearly in the same way as when we look at any great mechanical invention as the summing up of the labour, the experience, the reason, and even the blunders of numerous workmen; when we thus view each organic being, how far more interesting, I speak from experience, will the study of natural history become! ↗

— Charles Darwin

#natural-history #physicalism #experience

Every time we killed a thousand Bugs at a cost of one M.I. it was a net victory for the Bugs. We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution; the Bug commisars didn't care any more about expending soldiers than we cared about expending ammo. Perhaps we could have figured this out about the Bugs by noting the grief the Chinese Hegemony gave the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance; however the trouble with 'lessons from history' is that we usually read them best after falling flat on our chins. ↗

— Robert A. Heinlein

#heinlein #history #starship-troopers #war #communism

But then what is the alternative to trying to tell the truth about the Holocaust, the Famine, the Armenian genocide, the injustice of dispossession in the Americas and Australia? That everyone should be reduced to silence? To pretend that the Holocaust was the work merely of a well-armed minority who didn’t do as much harm as is claimed-and likewise, to argue that the Irish Famine was either an inevitability or the fault of the Irish-is to say that both were mere unreliable rumors, and not the great motors of history they so obviously proved to be. It suited me to think so at the time, but still I believe it to be true, that if there are going to be areas of history which are off-bounds, then in principle we are reduced to fudging, to cosmetic narrative. ↗

— Thomas Keneally

#holocaust #injustice #injustice

History is the essence of innumerable biographies. ↗

— Thomas Carlyle

#genealogy #history #people #biography

I'd rather be a pessimist because then I can only be pleasantly surprised. ↗

— Ben Franklin

#history #biography